by Susan Conley
All year long I’ve hoped Thorne knew how much he mattered. Every week I asked him—Do you know how much? Even when he said Yeah, yeah and smiled, I wanted a better answer. Wanted to tell him again, just in case there came a time when I wasn’t here to do it anymore.
Everyone claps when Thorne finishes his poem, but my cheering for him goes on much longer inside my head. It hasn’t stopped, really. My eight-year-old is still not too cool for school. Who knew we would make it this far away from the specter of cancer? And that we’d be more or less intact? Or that Thorne would read a poem onstage in China and take a bow with a wide smile on his face?
An hour later Aidan gets up onstage too. Except he’s wearing a shiny purple velour sweat suit the music teacher’s put him in, and he’s singing a Chinese song about an African crocodile. He has two maracas in his hands, and he shakes them to the beat. I’m crying again but it’s because I’m laughing so hard. Not at him. Aidan would never forgive me for that. I’m laughing at how much fun it is to see him up there, singing his lungs out. What Aidan has done in China is to make it his home. It took a long time. He was not easily convinced.
The other things Aidan has done in China are to get taller and to learn how to read. The impact of both of these on him can’t be understated: he’s almost as tall as his brother now, and no one in our family owns the inside track on reading anymore. Aidan has friends here, too. Aidan likes deep connections—to mark his friends with an X and not let them go. He seems aware of the precariousness of it all. He likes to double-check. Just to be sure. When we got home after the concert today, there was a birthday invitation for him on my computer from his friend Liam. That party is Saturday. “There’s four days between now and then,” Aidan said, counting on his hand. “What if Liam changes his mind? Can he take back a party invitation once he’s mailed it?”
One of the things I do now is talk to other women who’ve had breast cancer. The hospital back in Boston has set up an international phone line for us to call in to. And what an amazing thing that is. I’m in touch with six other women my age who are finishing their treatment. Great, funny women. We have a weekly phone call, and a therapist joins us. Talking to these women helps defuse the fear. There’s so much to say. An entire new language opens up—there are words about the worry of it that I’ve been holding in. I say them into the phone, and they start to lose their power.
The other thing I do with my time is more yoga. I still have pain in my left shoulder and along my rib cage. I meet Mimi on Wednesday and she asks me to see if I can try not thinking for whole minutes at a time. She tells me to breathe instead of think—to let the front of my brain drop away until I feel myself settle into my body. I’ve been scared of my body since the surgeries, afraid of what I might find there. Mimi says, “Watch yourself relax while you stretch, and take joy in that.”
Joy in it? How did she know there would be any joy left? I see how I’ve been ruminating on the cancer—still guilty of trying to solve for it. I haven’t wanted to spend time with myself. I lie down on the mat and stare at the white ceiling and begin to be able to be thankful for what I still have. For my husband. My children. Even my health.
Today’s yoga class ends with thirty minutes of Sanskrit chanting. I’ve never chanted before, but it’s just another thing I try for the first time in China that feels out of my comfort zone. Mimi leads us in the chanting, and I can’t get over the easiness of her voice—how it hits the high notes and then comes back down to earth. Everyone keeps their eyes closed the whole time we chant, and the feeling is one of being supported, propped up by the sound of so many other people’s voices in the room. I don’t feel so alone in China anymore.
After yoga I walk over to the Bookworm to listen in on a journalists’ roundtable talk, and I’m calm in the way that chanting for thirty minutes in Sanskrit in the lotus position for the first time can make you. The room is packed, and we all have pens out and little notepads on our laps. It’s just one week after the anniversary of last year’s Tibetan protests, so expectations in the audience are high.
One journalist starts by announcing that all forms of print journalism will be dead in twenty years. And isn’t that depressing. But we aren’t here to talk about that. We want to know what it’s like to stand on the front lines in China. We’re after news. We want the reporters to tell us if access will get better in China—if there’s a way to uncover, as one person asks, “the real truth here.” Which is another way of wondering how long this thing they call Communism will be around. I want that question answered in a hungry way.
How hard is it to cover a story in China? I want them to tell us that too. The Los Angeles Times reporter tells us that a New York Times reporter has just been released after being held for twenty hours in a room in Yunnan Province with no explanation. He’d been walking around Tibetan houses there looking for a protest story.
Then an American professor reminds us that in totalitarian regimes the people don’t trust their government, and the government doesn’t trust its own people. The one Chinese expert on the panel says the Communist Party puts up walls to keep information from getting out of China, but the Chinese people just put up higher ladders. “Western reporters need to hold China to the same standards they hold the rest of the world to. China wants the foreign press to be nice,” he explains. But, he reminds us, “News is usually bad, because bad news is news.” There are bright spots, he says, in China’s understanding of free press. “For example, during the Olympics, the Chinese government had to attend press conferences and answer hard questions. Unfortunately”—he pauses—“the questions were only about the weather.”
Caskets
Yesterday was May 14, the one-year anniversary of my mastectomy, and I got stuck in our elevator. Elevators have always set me on high alert. They make me think of caskets. When I rang the alarm bell, nothing happened. Then I pressed the call button and began what I would call a long, heated exchange with some teenage security guard, who kept screaming at me in Mandarin. I believe he was asking me where I was. I believe I was telling him that I was on the eighth floor.
I should have assumed nothing. That is always a better way to proceed in Beijing. Assume nothing will unfold as planned and then everything is slightly surprising and more pleasant than predicted. “Wo yao yi ge ren!” I want someone, is what I screamed. (It was the only thing I could think of in Mandarin to say.) I want someone.
I got bitchy. I called Tony on his cell phone while he was in a very important meeting with Chinese bankers. I did not let him speak. I said, “No. No. I don’t care where you are. I am stuck in the elevator and you have to get me out of here.”
“Calm down,” Tony said slowly, “and tell me exactly where you are.”
“Stuck in the elevator. I already told you.” My voice was rising.
“But where, Susan? Where are you?”
“In our apartment building, for God’s sake. In Beijing. Where do you think I am?” I was in a boxing match with claustrophobia and I had to punch back or the feeling would trap me. Which is why I then said some pretty mean things to Tony. I felt like the elevator was getting smaller and smaller. “I AM IN CHINA,” I yelled at him. “IN THIS GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY YOU HAVE BROUGHT US TO WHERE THEY DO NOT HAVE AN ELEVATOR RESPONSE SYSTEM. I HAVE BEEN IN HERE FOR OVER TWENTY MINUTES.”
That’s when Tony asked the other people in the meeting with him if he could have five minutes alone to handle a personal emergency. “Susan,” I heard him say slowly into the phone. “You are screaming at me and you’re not being fair and I’m hanging up now. I am hanging up so I can call the building’s security.”
“Oh great,” I said. “Great! Now you’re being mean to me while I am stuck in the elevator.” What I didn’t understand until then was why people who are having anxiety attacks often lash out at others around them. They say things they don’t mean. But it feels good. Every time I yelled at Tony I got a little distance on the claustrophobia. My anger connected me to him.
&n
bsp; “Hanging up now,” Tony said again. He was mad. I could tell. “I am hanging up.”
“Asshole,” is what I said next. “You are an asshole.” Which was completely unfair and yet felt utterly sensible to me; at this point everyone I knew who was not stuck inside the elevator with me was an asshole. I could not see then that sometimes having cancer is like being stuck inside an elevator. Nor could I understand why my anger seemed so large. Then I started crying—I saw my face scrunch up and the tears flow because the elevator was lined with mirrors. I sobbed and I repeated in the empty air, “You are an asshole for hanging up on me.”
But Tony was gone by then. He was trying to talk in Mandarin to the Park Avenue security managers—trying to get someone to run over to Tower Five and open up the elevator doors. Until Tony reached the management office by phone, no one on site knew I was stuck. No one had understood my Chinglish into the elevator’s emergency sound system. They didn’t have anyone speaking English to help.
I am embarrassed that I called my husband an asshole. He did not deserve it. But when he called me back and told me to sit tight—that someone would be there soon to let me out—I yelled at him some more about how today was the one-year anniversary of my mastectomy surgery and why hadn’t he said anything about it to me? Which gets me back to the fact that most people, even the people who love me most dearly, don’t always know how to talk about cancer.
Tony offered that his mind had been on my mastectomy all day. I said it didn’t count just to think thoughts inside your head. You had to voice them. That was the key part of being a cancer patient for me. People had to tell me what they were thinking about the cancer. If not all of it, then at least the good parts. And if they didn’t have anything good to say, then they should make something up. “Saying what you think is part of our marriage,” I yelled into the phone at Tony. “It’s how we are able to stay in China,” I reminded him. “We have to say the things we’re thinking.”
Then I heard a call waiting beep. I was sweating by then and feeling nauseous. I wondered if the claustrophobia would make me throw up or faint. Everything felt like a crisis. The call was from Aidan and Thorne’s school bus ayi, asking me where I was because the bus had been waiting ten minutes. “I can’t come,” I said to her in English. “I’m stuck in an elevator.” I have no idea how much of that sentence the Chinese bus monitor understood.
Tony called me back and said, “I know you’re hurting. I know you’re scared. I know it’s a terrible anniversary so I’m going to forgive you for what you said.”
“I need you to call Mao Ayi,” is how I answered him. I had no interest in his forgiveness. I wanted more of his attention. I needed all of it. “Call Mao Ayi and tell her she needs to run down the eight flights of stairs to go get Aidey and Thorne.” What I wanted to tell him was he had no idea what it’s like to have a mastectomy or to be stuck in a high-rise Chinese elevator for twenty-five minutes with no sign of help. But in the end, I didn’t tell him either of those things. Instead, what I did was get quiet. I realized that the yelling was only working me up more.
Then I heard an older Chinese voice on the elevator speaker: “It is me.” Who? I wanted to ask. He said, “I am sorry. It is my fault that you are stuck in the elevator. Can you please wait five more minutes?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Okay.” I said, “Fine.” And then I recognized the voice—not the actual person behind the voice, but the voice itself. It was the voice of Chinese civic responsibility. It was the voice of communal duty—the one that takes the collective blame. Because in Beijing, so much still depends on the Confucius way: the hierarchical order. The acceptance of consequences.
A small man in a blue utility uniform finally opened the elevator doors. He held what looked like a crowbar in his hands. Six people stood behind him: property managers and sub-managers in blue and white Park Avenue uniforms. All of them stared at me while the doors slowly parted. For one second I felt like a trapped animal set free. But I was not done yet with my anger. I stepped off the elevator and I screamed at them. I said that my sons had been waiting for me on their school bus. I said it was terrible that they didn’t have one single person in the elevator control room who spoke English. I yelled at the people and they stared back at me silently. One of them could have reminded me that I was in their country. And that I could have gotten myself together and learned some more Chinese—at least the words for trapped in the elevator. But these people were too polite to tell me to get off my high horse. They stared at me and nodded. Then I slammed my apartment door shut and began crying again. What I think I meant to say was that mastectomies lingered, and so did anniversaries of mastectomies. It’s a date I should lose track of.
Tiger Leaping Gorge
Those are my two boys up ahead on the horses. Aidan is riding the brown one named Huami. Thorne straddles the paler one, Haley. Both boys think their Chinese horses are the greatest animals in Asia. Maybe in the world. We are in a steep mountain gorge in southern Yunnan Province during May Chinese Holiday Week. There’s also a guide named Aki with us. He has a long black ponytail and comes from a minority tribe near here called the Yi. Aki explains to me while we walk that his people used to be bandits who came down from the mountains at night and kidnapped Han townspeople as slaves.
The land here is a spectacular shade of bright green with terraced cornfields and rectangular rice paddies and acres of sunflowers. The peak of Tiger Leaping Gorge is over ten thousand feet high, and the path we’re on snakes the side of the mountain. Sometimes the drop is too high for me to look, and I hug the cliff and wonder. But mostly I feel calm. Aidan could ride Huami for eight hours each day and not want to get off. Both boys smile at me whenever I run and catch up with them. Aki has taught them to lean forward into their horses’ necks when they go up hills, and to lie back in the saddle on the way down.
After two hours of climbing, we stop at the home of Lao Du, the owner of the horses. His house is made of clay and brick. It has no electricity or running water and overlooks a deep V the river cuts between the stone mountainsides. Two wooden chairs with torn upholstery sit on the brick stoop. Lao Du’s wife motions to one of the chairs and gives me a cup of mint tea and two Chinese pears. She is a tiny woman wearing a Levi’s jean jacket in the heat. When she smiles, which is often, her whole face lights up. She hands Tony a bowl of walnuts and a round stone to crack them with.
We are miles from the nearest town, and there is a small convenience store on one side of the Dus’ porch: a red freezer hooked up to a generator contains Popsicles and ice cream bars. Crackers and potato chips and batteries are also for sale. Aidan chooses a pineapple Popsicle. Thorne takes a mango one.
Aki tells Tony that the Dus have lived on this land for centuries. He says that all the money they make goes to keeping their son and daughter in school. There is no school in the mountains, and their children board down in the nearest city. We eat the fruit and nuts and Popsicles and then stand and thank the Dus for their kindness. On the way out, we pass their neighbor—an older, stouter woman who sits on her own porch and does not smile at us. She has what looks like a competing convenience store: stacks of Wrigley’s gum, a glass fridge full of Cokes and Sprites. She turns and glares as we walk by.
I have just begun to consider forgiving everyone in my life who does not have breast cancer. This is no small thing. There is still a part of me that wants to hold something against healthy people. Not for being healthy—not for that exactly. My resentment has to do with an essential aloneness that cancer has woven into my days.
Here in Yunnan, the mountaintops stack one behind the other and create the illusion of stretching high into the ancient Chinese heavens. Many of the sunflower crops that line the path have blossomed into a swath of yellow. Tony is happy to be here. He’s got this reckless look in his eye that signals his willingness to live in Tiger Leaping Gorge for the rest of our lives. Soon I bet he’ll start talking about home schooling the boys and inquire about farmhouse
rentals in the valley. Meanwhile he’s taking hundreds of pictures of the mountains and the boys on their horses. “They love it here, don’t they?” he says as he squeezes by me on the path on his way to catch up with Aidan and Huami. “I knew the boys would love Yunnan. And you too—you love Yunnan, don’t you? I knew you would.” I don’t have to answer him when he gets like this. I just smile, and that’s enough to convince him.
I do like it here. Everything in the gorge has turned an even brighter green from recent rains; the wild grasses and evergreen trees, corn stalks and rice plants are full and lush and appear to ripple down to the river, which lies almost out of sight. We stop for the night in a scattering of houses built into the side of the mountain. I sit in the stone courtyard of the guesthouse and cannot get enough of the view.
Dinner is round loaves of warm bread served with sliced chicken or apples and bananas on top. Tony asks Aki if farmers in the valley make money off their crops. Aki stares into the distance and then says, “The farmers in Yunnan are very angry. The corruption makes them furious.”
“Is everyone in town corrupt?” Tony bites into the bread.
“A farmer cannot get the right price.” Aki points down the hill at a pear tree orchard. “Even in this tiny village there’s a head man, and if you won’t bribe him, you’ll never see a profit on your pears. You’ll never prosper. The corruption is so bad here you do not understand. You cannot get away from it. It is impossible.”
“A by-product of socialism,” I say.
“You cannot call this socialism,” Aki corrects me. “That is a bad joke. That is a lie. This is capitalism. And if things do not change”—here Aki’s face became serious—“in ten years it will be very dangerous in China.”
