by Susan Conley
“Are you from Israel?” the nurse asks me now. Her line of questioning is the main reason I don’t like to talk about much of anything with the Chinese nurses. I know I’m defensive. But sometimes it seems that once you get onto a subject—any subject—it’s hard to get the nurses to stop.
“No,” I say. I really don’t want to be having this conversation.
“Where is Israel?” she asks and finishes taking my blood pressure. “One twenty over ninety,” she reads and writes down the numbers.
“It’s in the Middle East,” I explain. I glance at her but her face is blank. I realize she has no idea what I’m talking about. I spread my hands out on the table. “Pretend my hands are the Middle East,” I say. “You know, Iran is here, Iraq is right next to it, and then Egypt and Israel.”
The nurse stares at my fingers unknowingly. Then she says, “I think Israel must be a very small country for me not to have heard of it.”
I lean back and take a breath. It’s alarming to me that the nurse in charge of vital signs at Beijing’s top international hospital does not know that Israel is a country. What do they talk about in social studies in Chinese schools? Do they ever look at maps? Globes? I am grumpy. I don’t like this place. This is the hospital that employs the Chinese surgeon who told me I was a worrier.
So does this nurse know anything about the persecution of Jews? Or about the millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps? Has she ever heard of the Holocaust? I’m alarmed. This nurse has got to be one of the more educated women in China. My mind races with the other things citizens of the world’s largest population might not know: important things like the gas showers at Auschwitz or what it means to have a First Amendment, or the names of countries like Rwanda and Sudan. Or how it could be that the world’s biggest Communist country is home to the highest number of millionaires and the best-selling Mercedes-Benz dealership in the world. I am overwhelmed at the efficacy of the Chinese totalitarian state.
But I’m getting carried away. I am losing my edge. I shouldn’t have come to the hospital. I should have stayed home. “What is your height?” the nurse asks me.
“I only know it in inches,” I say flatly. I want to blame her now for something. Anything. I want to hold her culpable. I want to tell her that my height will have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I get cancer again and won’t she just drop it? Won’t she leave me be? Doesn’t she understand that the thing I most want to know about my cancer is if it will ever come back.
I often try to tell myself I’ve done my job. I had the surgeries. I did everything the doctors asked me to do, and then I asked for more. And she has no idea what it’s like to wonder if it’s going to return. To wonder is something hallucinatory—a black, unsettled fear—something to stow deep in the trunk and send to the bottom of the sea.
She reads my chart and says nicely, “You are one hundred eighty centimeters. You are very tall. In China we are short people. If you were Chinese, you would be a basketball player or a model.” That’s when I return to my senses. This petite nurse is not my adversary. Even I can see that. And how unfair I’m being. She sticks a thermometer in my ear and announces with a smile that I do not have a temperature.
I go back to the lobby to wait for the doctor and run smack into my Israeli neighbor. I haven’t seen her in weeks, and isn’t this unusual—we were just talking about her homeland. She has two sons. Sometimes she sits on a stone bench near our apartment building and smokes cigarettes while she waits for the school bus. Today she appears to have cold sores on her lips and chin. We smile at each other. I begin to consider explaining to her what Israel does and doesn’t mean to at least one Chinese nurse I know in this hospital, but what I really want to do is sit down and gather my wits.
I’m done with the vital signs. Done trying to explain where Israel is. I’m nervous. The Israeli woman is here for cold sores and I am here for breast cancer and never the two shall meet. I feel like I’m on a distant sister planet to the planet other people in the waiting room live on. But who knows who might be dying in this small room? Or who is about to discover they have a disease? I can’t presume to know anyone else’s difficulties—a realization so basic, but the one piece of learning that has deepened my experience more than the rest.
The nurse calls my name, and I follow her into a larger examining room. Dr. M. gets to work right away—kneading my breasts like pizza dough and running her fingers over them in circles. There have been changes in the right breast. Densities. I was right. It is the beginning, the doctor says, of fibrocystic disorder. What does this mean to me in Beijing at two o’clock on a Thursday? Not very much. It means we will watch the right breast—the real one—just a little more closely.
Next a nurse comes in and begins to set up for my six-month Zometa infusion. This is the drug that helps my bones now that I suppress my ovaries and there’s no estrogen to feed them. The nurse seems stern at first. She tells me to get comfortable in her broken English, but when I lie back on the bed, she grabs my arm and tells me, “Not yet, not yet. I still have a lot of things to get ready.” She has a pretty face with freckles, and short-cropped hair that makes her look like a boy. She has to hook the IV bag on the pole and prepare the needle. Finally, she motions for me to lie down. Then she examines my veins for a long spell. When she finds one she likes on the side of my wrist, she slides the needle in expertly. “You will be here for half an hour,” she answers, and sets the IV drip to a speed she likes.
Then she looks down at me and adds out of nowhere in her monotone English, “You are a brave woman. You are strong. I see your happiness on the outside. But I know inside you hurt.” I nod and stare at her through my tears, and then she leaves.
Top Gun
“Marcus,” I say, trying to get my mind off the weights he has me lifting. It’s a Saturday afternoon in February. “How did you come to work at the Ozone Fitness Club?”
“I went to college to become an electrical engineer,” he says in English. “My father was one before me. But while I was in school, I began bodybuilding. No one was doing this in China then. The gyms were terrible. There were only three in Beijing. Bad equipment. None of these machines.” He points to the treadmills lined up along the windows. “I worked on my biceps, triceps, and chest. A new gym opened in a complex called Soho. I went there and I looked so good, the owner asked if I wanted a job.”
“You left your old job?” I ask. “Wow.”
He nods. “It was very big. I did not know what I was doing, exactly. I made mistakes. No one was training in China. You have to understand. The only thing people began to do was to try to look good—to make their muscles bigger. Slowly we learned about proper technique. We learned this from the Americans then. They were very good. Now not so much, but back then, the Americans were serious and the training was good.”
“How did you leave your old job?” I open my water bottle and drink.
“It was an easy job. All the factory jobs are easy like that here. Maybe you have four or five men, but very little work. You make tea. You sit and talk. You do not do much work. It is easy but boring.”
“Isn’t that changing now?” I’ve never asked him so many questions before.
“Yes, China is moving faster. The jobs are changing. The young people,” he says, “are used to the speed.”
“But the old people,” I ask. “What is going to happen to them?”
“They are all retired. They sit and play cards, and I think they’re bored. They don’t have religion like we do.”
“Religion?”
“Yes, you know that when Mao Zedong came to power, he said religion was not good. Do you know who Mao Zedong is?”
“I know,” I say.
“He stopped all religion.” Marcus bends to adjust my seat lower on the back press. I have to do thirty of these presses before the next break. “Nobody could be religious. So my parents, they have no religion. But me, I am religious.”
“You are?” I’m surprised.
“What religion are you?” I push the weights back again with my feet so that I am lying almost prostrate on the machine.
“I am a Buddhist,” Marcus says with a smile. He seems proud. “I am a Buddhist, and now we can have religion in our lives again here.”
I stand up and take a sip of water. “Are you still writing your stories?” he asks, except I can’t understand the words at first. I stare at his mouth and he makes a motion like writing with a pen in the air.
“I am.” But I don’t want to talk about my writing. I’m at the gym to work up a sweat. To forget about writing and the state of my mind and the status of my cellular, molecular bodily makeup.
“Every day?” he asks then. “Every day you write?”
“Almost every day,” I say.
“Now we go work on abs,” he decides out loud. “Abs and lower back. Follow me.” He sets out across the gym toward the Nautilus machines, walking on the balls of his feet.
“Do you read much, Marcus?” I ask while I start my first set of crunches.
“I read history,” he says and looks away for a moment. “We have had revolutions in this country. Did you know that?”
“I did.” I can’t tell how far he will go with this conversation.
“We have had bad times when the schools closed and the students were sent down to the fields,” Marcus says quietly. “They worked with the peasants. Or they joined the army. Very hard times. You should read our history books and write about it to tell your country.”
“I would like that,” I say. Is he joking? Me write a new version of Chinese history? But—this is the thing that always catches me about Marcus—he is completely sincere. I’m sweating now. I’m waiting for him to say I can get off this machine. “But I think it would be too difficult.”
“It would be very hard for you.” He nods. “So much to learn. I had a professor in college.” Marcus smiles now. “He was a historian. He was smart. I was too busy playing sports in college. I could never stay in the classroom. This professor, he said that if you were born after 1980 in China, then you had no past. You were the young generation and the hard times were over.”
“Is this true?” I ask, panting.
“Oh, it is very true. The young people here, they care only for their video games and movies. They do not read. My college professor, he also said something else. He told me that if you were born before 1976 in China, then you had no future.”
“Because you were too old?”
“Because you had lived through the hard times. But you would never adjust. You would always be living in the past. Okay, another round.” He motions to the abs crunch bench. “One, two, three, let’s go.” I begin a new round of twenty. “Mao was the leader of the revolution,” Marcus says. “Did you know that our old people starved? That the ones alive today have gone many days in their lives without eating?”
“I have heard that,” I say. We are alone in the corner of the gym. I am fairly certain no one can hear us, unless the gym is bugged, which is never out of the question. But why is he talking about this today? I cannot figure out a way to tell Marcus that in our country we know about Mao—that our government uses the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as examples of everything that’s wrong with Communism.
“We do not understand that kind of mass hunger in my country,” I explain. “We have had hard times. Years of trouble. We’ve had civil war and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Did you hear about this time?”
“The great what?”
“We call it the Great Depression. Many people lost their jobs. This was one time in our country when many people were hungry and starved.”
“But it was your economy that was the problem. Right? Not your leaders?” Marcus stands back and stretches his neck from side to side. I wonder if he’s nervous. “In China, it’s the people who are the problem. The politicians. They are the ones who cause the suffering.”
We move on to a leg press machine. Marcus keeps forgetting how many sets I’ve done and makes me do five instead of three. “There was a movie in 1994,” he says and counts my repetitions in Chinese. “It was the first American film to change the way the Chinese saw Americans. Do you know it? It was called For Gun.”
“Huh?” I say and stop. My thighs are burning. The hip-hop music is blasting. “I do not know this movie.”
“Tom Hanks was the actor. It was a huge movie here.”
“I think you mean Top Gun.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it. With Tom Hanks. For Gun.”
I study Marcus’s lips. “No, that’s Top Gun,” I say. “I think you mean Top Gun. Tom Cruise was in Top Gun.” It’s always alarming to hear what movies the Chinese have watched to form their impressions of America. Often it’s Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger films. I can’t get my mind around the idea of the rest of the world misreading our nation based on the Terminator series.
“I am sure it was Tom Hanks.” Marcus looks away. “I remember now: Forest Gun was the name.”
“Oh, you mean Forrest Gump.” I climb off the machine.
“Yes. Yes. Forrest Gump was the first time we saw an American movie in China that was not about killing or war. It was the first time we understood that Americans were more interesting. It was when we began to understand America. We did not have the Internet then. We only had government-censored TV. We did not know what Americans looked like. Now we understand. Now everyone is on the Internet.”
I nod at him. Better Forrest Gump than Top Gun.
“We do stretching now,” Marcus says and points. “Come.” Stretching means I sit down on a weight bench and Marcus lifts both my hands over my head. Then he pulls on my elbows and shoulders until my arms dangle loose like chicken bones. I have to breathe in and out and close my eyes because it hurts on the side of the surgery. “You are stronger now,” he says when he’s finished. “Your form is better. You look better too. Much better than when we started.”
Office Party
The next night I have to decide what to wear to Tony’s office party. It’s a slapdash thing, he told me yesterday. There’s no funding for parties like this now that the economic sky has fallen. But Tony says you still have to get together—you still have to try to build morale. I agree. I just wish the morale-building didn’t have to involve me. I don’t go out much these days. But Tony says many spouses have agreed to come—the Chinese husbands and wives of the software engineers and consultants who work in Tony’s office.
I choose a green-flowered wraparound dress from my closet. It sounds bad but it’s actually fine with the high black boots I wear it with. I look normal in this dress, and by that I mean that my breasts look normal. Which is always my goal now. In this dress the fake one on the left sits almost directly parallel to the real one on the right.
The party is set up with five long banquet tables and boiling pots of broth at each place setting. Someone has put large plastic bottles of Coke and Sprite in the middle of each table. Wine is not a Chinese custom at dinners like this. But soon, waiters bring out warm bottles of Yanjing beer. Tony wants people to mingle before they sit down. He tells me he hates it when everyone in the office runs for their seats. The music helps. Tony hired a Brazilian singer from our apartment building named Lucio, who sings “The Girl from Ipanema.” But everyone still seems uncomfortable. They are awkward—as if they don’t know how to make small talk with their cubicle partners. As if they’ve never done this before. “Why don’t they want to mix it up?” Tony asks me.
I tell him he’s trying to make a Chinese office party into an American cocktail hour. And it kind of works. But only because Tony and Eric, Tony’s second in command, fan out around the room. “We won’t be eating for at least an hour,” I hear Tony say to many of the men. “Come listen to the music. No need to sit. No need.”
The next time I’m near Tony, he is standing beside Lucio’s electric piano, going over a small list his Chinese office manager, Cynthia, has made of the order of events. That is when he
looks at me and says, “I tried to keep you out of it. I really tried.”
I’m drinking my second glass of Sprite and pretending it is Sauvignon Blanc. I have no idea what he means. I’m hoping we can sit down soon. I’m hoping this night will pass quickly. If I’m honest, I’m hoping this whole year will pass quickly. Because on the calendar I keep in my head, each year that passes takes me further away from the cancer.
“Right,” I say to him. “I’m just here to listen and support you.” It’s important to him that I’ve come to the party. For a short while, when we first returned to Beijing, I thought I needed to distance myself from everyone, even Tony, in order to get better. I think I was trying to isolate the disease. Isolate myself. I can see now that this was not the best way.
“And that’s why”—Tony tries to smile—“when they call your name, just stand up quickly and come to the microphone and I’ll take it from there.”
“They’re not going to call my name,” I whisper loudly in his ear. “Because I am not going up to the microphone. That’s not why I came. Remember. Not at all why I came.”
“Oh yes you are.” Tony smiles. “You have no choice. Cynthia has gotten you a gift.”
“Oh God.”
“Oh yes. And there’s more.”
“There can’t be.”
“There are games. Marriage games.”
“I’m going to sit down now,” I say. “I’m not listening to you anymore.”
The gift Cynthia hands me up at the microphone is a cut-glass fruit bowl with red psychedelic swirls running through it. She has a glass bowl for each of the other six wives at the party, who are forced to listen to their husbands give short, painfully awkward speeches about how grateful the men are for spousal devotion. Cynthia has talked the men into doing it, and it’s a kind of public praise that doesn’t seem to come naturally here. I wince while the wives stand on the stage and look down at the ground.
