by Susan Conley
At least Tony is able to skip the devotion part. When it’s my turn to receive a bowl, he takes the microphone and says, “Susan and I would like to thank all of you for your hard work this year and for your support. We don’t know many people here in China, and you have been like family to us.” I smile and clap when the audience claps and think that these people have not really been like family. At least not to me. I hardly ever see these people. But it occurs to me that they might be like Tony’s family—his extended Chinese family. How lucky for him. A part of me is jealous. How different Tony’s and my days look in Beijing. He spends his time in an office with these interesting colleagues and gets to speak Chinese all day. I’m proud of him for what he’s done here—brought the company to China. Forged relationships.
I go sit down with my fruit bowl, but Cynthia calls me back. She says into the microphone that the games are beginning and asks me to take a seat onstage. Then she waves the other six wives up and gives them seats too, and blindfolds. No one said anything about blindfolds. The object of the game, Cynthia announces, is for the seven husbands, also blindfolded, to take each woman’s hand and figure out which is their wife.
My chair is first in the row. When the game begins, a strange man takes my fingers in his sweaty palm. “Is she your wife?” Cynthia asks him.
He presses my hand with his thumb and says with confidence, “Yes. This is my wife.” Which produces squeals from the audience. My new husband and I are herded off to the side in our blindfolds, where we wait, hand in hand, while the rest of the group tries to mate.
When it’s Tony’s turn, I hear him walk down the row of seated women with outstretched hands, quickly saying to each one, “No, not my wife. Not my wife. None of these is my wife.”
In the end, he’s paired with Jenny, the shy office secretary. When they stand together and hold hands, the audience cannot contain itself. People snort with laughter, they’re having so much fun. I smile and smile and think that if I have to smile any more my face will freeze. The finale comes when everyone takes off their blindfolds—all fourteen of us—and we realize that not one husband was able to find his own wife.
And even though I’m standing in front of a crowd of strangers, paired with a man I believe is married to Sophie Wu, the new office translator, I am still moved by my husband’s show of loyalty. By his knowingness of me, and that he did not mistake me for someone else.
When we’re allowed to go back to our table, I slink down low in my seat and guzzle more Sprite. That’s when Alan, in presales, gets up and takes the microphone. He smiles and, with no warning, begins belting out a Frank Sinatra song: “My Way.”
This is not on Cynthia’s schedule. We all stare, and then the audience begins to clap and cheer. They love the song. People are warming up now. They seem to think the singing is a fantastic end to an amazing night. Alan is earnest and off-key, and I begin to laugh silently, and then the laughing turns into giggling until I’m not quite able to get a handle on it. I bite the insides of my cheeks hard and bend down to pretend to fix my shoe. This is no time to unravel.
The singing is infectious. Now Frank stands up. The crowd cheers when he says he’s going to do a traditional folk song from his home province of Hebei. He begins, and it sounds like he’s screaming: high-pitched, loud, Chinese screaming. He opens his mouth unnaturally wide to get the sounds out. We can see his molars. The audience begs for more. When are we ever going to go home? Tony has family here now. My people are thousands of miles away, in cities where it is either too late or early to call because of the baffling time change.
Frank does another folk number, and just when it looks like Eric is going to take the stage to sing, Tony jumps up and grabs the microphone. “Thank you, Frank,” Tony says in Chinese, and smiles. “Thank you for that treat.”
Rose
I saw Rose again today. It’s almost spring in Beijing, and we met for tea on the indoor porch of a café called The Face. There were red antique tea tables. We sat on a pink-flowered couch. She looked older. Rounder. Her glasses frames are green now. She wore jeans. She always wears jeans. And this time a small fitted gray cape over a T-shirt. We ordered mango puer tea and snacks. She brought presents for the boys: Chinese picture books. She kept laughing her wonderful, high-pitched laugh.
“Are there a lot of Chinese people going to Turkey?” I wanted to know.
“Medium amount of people,” she said. “But more soon if Turkey joins the EU, because Chinese people see it as a way to get to Spain or Italy.”
“Do you like the job?” I asked. “Do you like it more than teaching?”
“I like the fixed salary. I make four thousand yuan a month, but it is constant. When I taught, sometimes I made two thousand. Sometimes six thousand. But it was never steady, and I was always tired.”
A waitress brings two pots of tea and then three stacked trays of bite-sized food. Rose unwraps the fork and knife from the paper napkin. She asks me how she is supposed to use the fork. “Do I hold it in my right hand or my left?”
“It’s complicated,” I say and show her. “You cut with the knife in your right hand, and then you switch it back. Or you can just leave your fork in your left hand. That’s okay too.” There are small ham sandwiches on toasted bread, and tuna with lettuce on miniature croissants. The tuna is surprisingly good. “How is your boyfriend?” I can’t help but ask.
“He is out of a job. My parents came for the Chinese New Year and said they did not want to see him. They think he is a nice boy, but he is not the one for me to marry. So I told him I was going home, when really I stayed here the whole time with my parents.”
“This sounds complicated. This sounds hard. Did he ever suspect you were still here?”
“I did a very good job of tricking him.”
“Both your parents came?”
“They stayed in my apartment. They like my new place. It is very nice.” Rose looks tired to me.
“What are your work hours?”
“It is not so bad. Eight hours a day and a half hour for lunch. But there is pressure.” She takes off her glasses. “There is so much pressure.”
“Do you mean from your boss?” I bite into a lemon tart.
“My boss is a Turkish official. She rejects most of the visa applications. Even the ones I approve. She has final say. She cannot read Chinese. Or speak it. I have to write my reports in English.” Rose claps her hands in delight. “This is a very good thing! This helps me practice. And I can tell that most of the applicants are faking it.”
“What do you mean, faking it?”
“The people are poor peasants from the countryside, but they come to the visa office pretending to be businessmen. They create false stories of companies they run and colleagues. Then I call the company and I can tell it’s not a real boss on the line—they’re speaking with an accent that’s wrong for the province. I call the wife listed on the application and I can tell she’s not the real wife, because she doesn’t know the name of her husband right away.”
“Wow,” I say, and take a sip of tea.
She smiles. “I used to be nice to the people. People would get their visas rejected but they would not leave the visa office. They would keep coming to my desk and asking me why. At first I tried to be helpful. I did not know any other way. Then one day last fall, a colleague told me I was too nice. He approached me during the working hours. He said, ‘We are not a hotel. We are not a restaurant. You are not offering a service. You are being too good to these people. You have authority now. You need to demand respect.’ And so I got a little meaner. I changed.”
I thought I could see this in her face—it was harder now. And her eyes did not sparkle as much. I wanted to say, “Don’t change! Don’t change.” She told me of a kind old Chinese couple who came to the office with an application because they wanted to go see their son and grandson in Turkey. “They had the right paperwork. They had money saved. I approved them. Because everything about them was appropriate. But my boss tur
ned them down. The only reason she gave was that they were old. She said she was certain they would want to stay and live in Istanbul. I had to tell the couple. They did not understand. I had to ask them to leave my desk in the end.”
We finish our tea. I’m trying to connect the Rose at the visa office to the Rose who taught me how to say “Hello, how are you?” in Chinese. There is some distance to travel between the two.
We walk out to the street. Rose asks me if I would like to play mahjong with her girlfriends sometime next month. “Just girls,” she says. “I want you to meet my friends.”
“Sounds great,” I say. “Sounds really good.” I am not sure if we will see each other again. If I will ever meet her friends. Our connection in this teeming city seems fleeting to me now. Rose is not my Chinese teacher anymore.
“You have homework, Susan.” Rose smiles. “You must learn to read the Chinese characters for the numbers one through ten. Each character. If you do this, then you will be able to play mahjong with me.” Then she opens the cab door, steps inside, and is gone.
Glitter
It’s Saturday night and Tony and I revive the lost tradition of date night. Aidan is eating yogurt from a mug on the floor while he watches his brother dance naked to the Jackson Five. The song is “ABC.” Mao Ayi watches from the kitchen door. She’s going to babysit for us tonight. I’m waiting for Tony to get out of the shower so we can go. The music is cranked and Thorne jumps up on the couch. Mao Ayi is laughing now and moving her body. Then she starts taking small steps: 1-2-3, 1-2-3. It’s the ballroom dancing I’ve seen all over China.
Aidan calls out to his brother, “I think this is a song about love.”
Thorne yells back, “Maybe Michael wants a girlfriend. Because his brothers all have one.” Thorne keeps leaping from the couch to the rug and screaming in the song whenever Michael does.
“He’s the youngest one,” Aidan reminds us. “Michael is the youngest and he hasn’t made a girlfriend yet.”
Tony and I say good-bye and take a cab to a Japanese sake bar called Manzo down a crowded alley on the other side of Chaoyang Park. The tables are white and the blue plates have tiny fish painted on them. Billie Holiday plays on the sound system. The Chinese waitress brings us a small chalkboard of handwritten fish specials. We order shrimp and grilled squid and cold Asahi beer from the tap.
I toast Tony for his month, for his year, for creating an office for his company here out of nothing. I toast him for his grace under pressure, and I mean it. He has an ease in China now.
He toasts me too. We’re not big on toasts, but he says he’s happy to sit here with me and eat the fish and drink the beer. He predicts we will have many good years to come. And this is just like him—to think of our future and not our past. I’m grateful to Tony for that too, for moving us forward.
When I was in college I lived with a boyfriend from Canada. When he graduated, he hung on in our Vermont town waiting for me to finish school. We were the couple who could never decide if we were meant to be together. We both wanted to be writers. One day I opened his journal while he was working as a sous-chef at the local inn. It was a deceitful thing to do. He always left it on the bedside table. Inside, he’d started a letter to a friend he’d been in a rock band with. It said, “I’m living with a girl who is too attached to the past.”
I read his words, and then I put the journal down like it was burning. What did it mean? To be attached to the past? I knew I was implicated. Somehow his sentence sounded like a code for something much worse than nostalgia. After I graduated, he and I packed our things and drove to Toronto. We talked about marriage. He was a funny, brilliant person. But I always carried his words in my head. And he was probably right. I was attached to the past. I didn’t know then how that would translate in my life. Or if it was really a bad thing in the end. I always wanted to tell him I’d read the letter. But I never did. And then we both married other people.
Sometimes, during my cancer treatment, Tony has served as the gatekeeper to my past. He’s always up for the next doctor’s visit, the next surgery. He sees no worth in revisiting history. He doesn’t like me to dwell on yesterday or the day before. This is a sticking point for us. Because sometimes I think the past holds clues. On certain bad days I can’t help myself—I relive the last few years or months, trying to detect a crack. Trying to deduce where the cancer might have crept in. Tony catches me in the act and says What matters is that you’re healthy. Why all the looking back?
After dinner, Tony and I take another cab to The Hotel G, where the bar is retrofitted in raw slabs of concrete. There’s a speed-dating party going on. The Chinese organizer asks if we want to join. “Even though you are married,” she says in English, “you can just do it to meet people.”
So we find ourselves sidled up to the bar—surely the only married couple there—with singles filling out white information sheets about themselves with small pencils. I would guess the male to female ratio is two to one. Lots of smokers. The average age is thirty. A man to my right is wearing something around his neck that looks like a cross between a tie and a scarf. There’s a DJ spinning vinyl near the far window, and the electronica he plays has a heavy backbeat, with fake clapping and a synthesizer that simulates the sounds of laser guns.
Tony and I order single-malt whiskeys—something to sip while we watch. Most of the men lean their backs against the bar. Many of the women wear black dresses. The blender does not stop whirring fruit-flavored drinks. A lot of the speed-daters get out their cell phones and pretend to be busy. A teenage Chinese boy wearing a lime green down parka walks into the bar and then walks out.
I think there might be a lot of lonely people in China. I’ve read that since parents no longer arrange the marriages, there’s a new restlessness in the country. People keep trickling into the bar. The staff rushes to take drink orders. There’s a Chinese man with a white teapot in front of him who has no one to talk to and keeps tapping the bar with his hand. The man with the scarf that looks like a tie approaches the bar and orders another beer. I can see green glitter sparkling on his face. The organizer runs over and tells us the dates will be in five-minute intervals. I want to sip my drink and watch, but Tony keeps egging me on.
“It will be fun,” he says. “One of those once-in-a-lifetime things. You can write about it. Do research.”
When I met Tony, I prepared for a life of triangulation: China, my husband, and me. But not tonight. It’s late now. Mao Ayi must be wondering. I’m tired and I want to go home. I am already married, I turn and say to my husband. To you. I am married to you.
When we get to the apartment, Mao Ayi is waiting on the couch. She’s had a busy night, she explains to Tony in Chinese. Both boys wanted pai pai. She says it took a long time to pai pai Aidan and then Thorne was mad because he’d been waiting for his pai pai.
“Pai pai” is what Mao Ayi calls patting the boys’ backs while she sings them songs in bed. She loves to do it. The boys have gotten wise to what a good thing they have going. Because Mao Ayi will do pai pai until you have fallen asleep. Which is a lot longer than my American version of pai pai.
The boys discussed it in the afternoon before Tony and I went out—who would get it first and for how long. Thorne was jealous because last time, it took Mao Ayi so long to pai pai Aidan that Thorne fell asleep waiting and never got his. Mao Ayi stands up from the couch and goes to the hall to put on her leather jacket. She wears a proud smile and tells us again how the boys were crying—They were fighting, she says in Chinese, over which one would get the first pai pai.
Chinese Basketball
It’s the first day of March again—a warm Wednesday afternoon in Beijing—and I wait for the bus with the Taiwanese moms, who’ve just returned from another one of their long karaoke lunches. Flora’s best friend, Judy, is there. She always has a smile for everyone. I ask her how her son is. “He is too short,” Judy says with a serious face. “He is just too short and it’s a big problem.”
I have to give Judy credit for her candor. No one I know in the States would say what Judy has just said. Judy herself is one of the shortest people I’ve met in China. She says she doesn’t understand why her son is so small and that she tells him every day to grow. “I get him to play basketball too. I think jumping will help him grow taller.”
Judy asks me if I want to get in on a bulk order of seaweed the Taiwanese moms are having shipped from the home country. “It’s the best seaweed in the world,” Judy says. “It has minerals and iron and calcium for growing bones.” I order two packages and am supposed to pay her when the shipment comes in.
When Thorne gets off the school bus, he looks to me like he’s of average height. I make a mental note to check on this soon. He announces that he is Villager Number Two in the school’s Robin Hood musical. Back at the apartment, I look in his notebooks until I find the play’s script and read it through. It turns out Villager Number Two has one line in the entire production. Count it. One. But Thorne’s upbeat about it. He’s the only second grader with a speaking part, and he has twelve songs to memorize, which means he walks through the apartment singing again. This time the songs are not patriotic, or sung out of some raw dislocation anxiety. Robin. Robin Hood. Always doing good. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor. I think Thorne’s made it to the other side. Beijing is where he lives now. He’s more like himself here than ever before. Or maybe he’s changed into someone else entirely in China, someone he never would have become in Portland.
On Thursday I go to the school assembly because Thorne tells me he’s reading a poem onstage. When it’s time for the second graders, my son bounds up the three stairs to the microphone stand, where he recites a piece he’s written in homeroom called “Mother.” I had no idea this was coming. I wasn’t sure if Thorne even liked me anymore—I’d been distracted so much of last year, tired and spacey from the surgery and the treatment. Thorne’s poem has words in it like loving and defending and awesome. I sit frozen in my chair, tears leaking from my eyes, and I know this is one of the moments to pay attention to. They don’t come crystallized like this often.
