“Really? I am a high school teacher in Guangzhou.”
Two steps, pause. “Guangzhou?” asks the older soldier. “Have you been to Hong Kong?”
“I have. A beautiful city, on an island, tall buildings right beside the sea.”
“What do you think? Of Hong Kong returning to China?”
“Today is a happy day for China,” I say. “An extraordinary moment.”
We come upon an obstinate group of picnickers. I speak first. “Get up!” I say in Mandarin. A young woman looks at me and bursts out laughing. I look at her and laugh too. “Are you ready?” I ask.
She nods and stands up, and the group leaves with her. An intoxication washes through me as I watch them—the masses—retreating before us, granting our wish, heeding our whim. I feel connected to it all, to both sides, somehow.
Alone, these soldiers around me are nervous, curious, weak schoolboys; united, they’re omnipotent. I walk with them fifty more steps, and then I say goodbye. I stride off, faster, in front of them, fleeing just like everyone else.
Chapter 8
The Chinese Word for Carrot
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius, Shu King 5:9
The four of us, the American teachers, first met in Hong Kong, where we foolishly took air conditioning for granted. Two days of confusion and jetlag in a plush hotel ended abruptly when we climbed aboard a train and rumbled away from the modern metropolis, north through undulating green hills, up Kowloon peninsula, across the border, and into the People’s Republic of China. We passed through the border city of Shenzhen, and soon flat brown farmland unfurled all the way to the horizon. Half an hour later a city sprouted around us like a maze: sprawling junkyards, concrete highway overpasses, and row upon row of pastel green apartment towers. This was Guangzhou. We’d arrived.
In an immaculate yellow business suit, her hair a perfect black triangle behind her ears, Mrs. Yuan greeted us on the platform with dainty handshakes. The concrete station around us was filthy, and the August day sucked us into a suffocating, tropical warmth from which it wouldn’t release us for months. But we didn’t know that yet. An uneasy smile crossed Mrs. Yuan’s face, as if she were lying to us about something. She showed us to a white Hi Ace minivan, where the driver laughed at us and called us gwailo (foreigners) as he eagerly jammed our large load of luggage into the back. He piloted us through the city and took the women—Lauren and Paige—to a drab off-campus apartment which we would soon call comfortable. Byron and I were then delivered to campus. We were dropped at a dormitory that featured prison-like bars enclosing the windows and porches. Mrs. Yuan accompanied us to the top floor, the third. “Boys live on the first floor, girls on the second,” she explained, saying nothing about our floor. I watched her for clues. And dangerous foreign men on the third?
She opened a barred gate and brought us to door 302, which gave way to reveal a cell with white walls and bald concrete floors. She crossed the concrete floor, pointing proudly at our two great luxuries: a pale green refrigerator squatting in one corner and a dusty television perched on a rickety desk. It was as hot as an oven, and I felt numb. She led us into our other room, a bedroom furnished with two more rickety desks, two narrow plywood wardrobes, and two sidewalk-hard beds hidden under thick mosquito netting. Our one window faced a large apartment tower. A jackhammer was destroying something nearby. “Welcome to your home,” she called pleasantly over the clatter. We followed her into a five-foot-by-six-foot box of white tile—the kitchen—and Byron turned the sink’s single knob. Out came… a sucking sound. Fortunately we weren’t thirsty. “The proletariat shall go without water,” Byron smiled at me, “to test their commitment to the Revolution.”
“Boil water first?” Mrs. Yuan told us. “Before drinking?” She didn’t seem comfortable in any part of the English language. She was our liaison with the school, she told us, and then she left.
I’d taken three semesters of college Mandarin, and Byron didn’t speak a word of any Chinese dialect, so we decided quickly that if we were to survive, we’d have to divide our labors: I’d become our shopper, our maverick in the marketplace, the one attempting to distinguish the edibles from the poisons at the local bazaar, and he’d be the cook, experimenting with the obscenely enormous wok, antique kettle, and hefty meat cleaver waiting there in the kitchen.
The moment soon arrives, the time, the day, the hour, after my befuddling classes have finished for the afternoon. I’m hungry. My first expedition to the market can wait no longer. My mind kicks into gear, dazzling me with visions of exotic Casbahs overrun with Hollywood’s swarthiest criminals. I’ll get cheated, robbed, kidnapped. I’ll have to haggle for carrots. I prepare mentally some self-defense moves, contemplate bringing a weapon, and practice a few Chinese phrases. I don’t even know the Chinese word for carrot. I settle on a pocketknife, a backpack, my red pocket dictionary, and a mass of brightly colored notes amounting to 200 yuan, eight of which could make a dollar on the other side of some vast ocean.
The campus reclines under soupy sunlight. Students are playing table tennis on scattered concrete tables and jumping rope on a dirt volleyball court. I pass the dilapidated swimming pool and the three naked concrete basketball courts. After the baby blue classroom towers, I pass the tree-shaded, ancient-looking orange brick administrative building, which holds Mrs. Yuan’s office. The campus gate spits me out, onto narrow Yandun Street. It’s a river of cars, bicycles, and motorcycles, and the flow of vehicles pushes the stream of pedestrians up onto tiny sidewalks and nearly inside the shops that make do without front walls.
I join the stream, threading my way on a sidewalk, letting other bodies push past me: a dark-skinned peasant man balances two wooden buckets of cabbage on a long beam over one shoulder; a business woman in teal hurries along the crumbling sidewalk in high heels. I squeeze by peddlers of chicken kebabs and faux leather wallets. I pass small, packed restaurants that exhale fabulous aromas of plum sauce and sautéing garlic, and faces everywhere follow me, like sunflowers tracking the sun. Involuntarily, I ensure that I’m wearing pants. Pants, check. Must be something else. In a nook between two cafés, three men squat and munch on white ears of corn. They stare at me. I stop and smile, and there we are, sharing approval of something, something that I can’t quite put my finger on but that a voice calls ridiculousness—the notion that the rare species gwailo, long-nosed and pale-skinned, is here, out of its habitat.
The food smells are pierced by odors of garbage and chemical floor cleaners. I pass an alley of apartment towers with balconies like metal cages: bars imprison the residents while restraining lush fruit bushes and suspending wet laundry. I pass a shop selling stationery and pens, followed by another, and then another, and it makes me think that perhaps shopkeepers here aren’t bent on putting their competition out of business. What I don’t see is a Casbah, a market, a busy bazaar, and I stop and reach for my dictionary. A balding man in a brown tank top sits on a stool, half inside and half outside the third of the four stationery shops. His arm rests on a bright blue ice cream freezer, and his eyes—and those of two men in the next shop—are on me. I inhale.
“Qĭng wèn, shìchăng zài năr?”
“Eh?” he squints.
This is supposed to be your language, old man. I try again, since it’s all I’ve got, even if every word I learned in college was wrong. “Shìchang zài năr?” Where is the market?
“Shìchăng ah?” He smiles knowingly. He tells me what might be his entire family history, and I think back to college, Amherst, where I spent all of my sophomore year and half of my junior year fumbling like an impostor through Mandarin Chinese language labs. He’s still talking and I haven’t caught a word. I can’t even tell if it’s Mandarin or Cantonese. He points down the street, and waves left. I thank him (Xièxiè).
He laughs and waves me off.
So I press on, passing a tiny toy store jammed with racetracks and video games and boys and men playing together, zappin
g, steering, and punching. The synthetic sounds spill out and mingle with the honking cars and growling motorcycles. A horn screams in my ear and I leap into some kind of medicine shop as a blood red taxicab careens by. The other pedestrians and bicyclists adjust their trajectory and evade the cab by inches. I turn and smile awkwardly at the man behind the counter as a glow flushes his face; he laughs at me; he point to the jars of roots, berries, and powders behind him; the air carries scents of fish scales.
Back on the street, Michael Jordan stands in front of a shoe store, his life-size cardboard simulacrum propped against a wall. I touch the cardboard basketball pinned between his arm and hip. The street opens into an enormous plaza walled in by billboards, and pedestrians stream throughout the space, filling the entire area, shopping, jostling, queuing for a handful of idling buses. Behind a newspaper stand, a woman cries out the name of a paper: “Wanbo, wanbo!” I push through the crowds and turn left—as the old man instructed—uphill, towards the fierce yellow sun. A huge cartoon chicken perches above a Western-style fast food restaurant. Glancing inside, I spot several kids in Peizheng uniforms sitting on molded plastic chairs, using plastic forks on oily fries and fried chicken. Across the street, a pet store with live ducks and rodents in cages on the sidewalk turns out to be a traditional restaurant. The scent of roasting soy sauce wafts out as I watch a young couple point thoughtfully at a black rabbit, then pause to gaze at me and my white nose. The animals seem to eye me too, and my mind is lost in a memory of our fast food chains, with their posters of hamburgers and hot-fudge sundaes. Here it takes a stronger type of advertising—real flesh and blood—to tempt passersby.
Cookies and biscuits fill bowls on two street-side tables. I spot the caramel chip cookies I loved in college, and I signal to a saleswoman who’s busy wrapping up four coconut-topped buns for a gray-haired woman. “Duōshăo qián?” (How much?) I point to the cookies.
“Wŭ kuài yī jīn,” she snaps, too busy to gape for more than a moment. Five yuan for something.
“Wŏ yào liùge,” I say. I want six.
She hands me a paper bag, and I place six of the golden brown cookies inside. From my pocket I extract a brown five-yuan note that features the heads of two smiling Tibetans. I’d buy bread too, but I don’t see any loaves among the buns and yellow biscuits. The saleswoman returns, grabs my bag, sets it on a scale. “Yī kuài sì máo qián,” she barks, pushing up a shirtsleeve energetically in the heat. I hand her my 5元 note and she drops 3.60元 into my palm. Two little girls laugh at me from across the street as I reach into the bag and continue up the street, thinking six big cookies for twenty cents! Recalling pleasant autumn afternoons in Massachusetts, I gobble half of the tan cookie into my mouth. It’s all wrong. Egg yolks and burnt pork and weird sour spices stick to my throat, choking me, and I heave, hacking it up right onto the street. Not cookies. I manage to swallow what remains on my tongue of the nasty, hard snack biscuit and squeeze the remainder of it into an overflowing green trashcan. Not caramel, not college. I shove the bag into my backpack thinking Byron might like them.
An alley opens to my left, a passageway flanked by slaughterers and festooned with a thousand hanging hunks of meat, and a menagerie of animal heads. The alley teems with people, and I realize I’ve arrived. I push through, into the dank market, my sandals sticking to the ground. Flies buzz on long duck carcasses that hang from rods above raw, pink slabs of flesh. My foot slips on something, and I land on a knee, and my face is inches from a leathery pig’s face. Suspended there, open-eyed, dried mud slung across its round left nostril, the head rests there, waiting, bodyless, in a silver bowl. A salesmen behind it busily hawks its chopped and diced muscles, its organs, feet, and skin on a long plank. Strings of scarlet red intestines—sausages?—hang overhead from nails. The air stinks of sawdust and blood.
“Gwailo!” A man in a blood-smeared green apron calls cheerfully to me as I wade onward. He holds up a plucked, pitch-black chicken. I nod, giving my approval, uncertain why its skin is so dark. Blood pours over the gleaming, silvery scales of fish heads as a man decapitates live fish, enthusiastically shoving one at me as I pass his stall. Behind him, two women pause and smile at me, then resume chopping at juicy hunks of something. Yesterday Byron mentioned what I’d been unwilling to confess—I’m terrified of falling ill—and we decided to eschew cooking meat at home, at least for now.
I forge on, to still tinier stalls that sell dried goods: rice, beans, noodles, mushrooms, nuts, spices; everything is on display in sacks, buckets, tanks, jars, and bottles. In a stall redolent with tangy, sweet, earthy smells—mushrooms, anise, ginger—I screw my courage to the sticking place and ask the young shopkeeper about soy sauce. His eyes go wide, taking me in, pointing to a bottle with a fancy yellow label. I nod, and say, “Good?” He replies happily, and I think he’s agreeing with me, so I accept a bottle. I also select flat squares of dry yellow noodles, white rice, coarse salt, and shelled peanuts. Things I recognize. He fills a bottle of cooking oil from a tall metal vat. “38元,” he says, chuckling at me. I pay him and leave, hoping my second purchase will prove wiser than my first.
A pale blue strip of sky floats overhead between six-story buildings. I understood that guy! Perhaps the two of us are the same age, and maybe at heart we’re not so different—I could be the soul born here, scooping rice and noodles, and he could be the soul faraway, exploring and working in a foreign land. Or perhaps he just slowed down his speech for me, something no one else here cares to do. Maybe he’s from elsewhere and his first language is Mandarin. Originally the Beijing dialect, Mandarin was declared four decades ago China’s pŭtōnghuà (common tongue), and all teachers and television reporters are now required to use it. Still, around here, common folk speak mostly the local dialect, Cantonese, and while they understand and speak Mandarin when necessary, they don’t employ its gentler syllables casually.
The sea of bodies engulfs me again where a collage of colorful mounds covers the ground: fresh scallions, purple cabbages, husky carrots, green peppers, apples, garlic, bok choy, and red and brown fruits I don’t recognize. I crouch down in front of an ancient-looking man, feeling a drop of sweat roll over my ribs as legs brush by my back. The man smiles at me, his dark cheeks creased with diagonal lines. I thumb open my dictionary and finally learn the Mandarin for carrot.
“How much for the húluóbò?”
“Qī kuài wŭ yi jīn,” he reveals, toothless, speaking Mandarin, his eyes sparkling. I think he means it’s 7.50元 for a jīn, which is a Chinese weight measurement slightly heavier than a pound. The húluóbò are enormous and the most brilliant orange I’ve ever seen. He holds open a little white plastic bag and I stick a huge carrot inside. After two more, he places the handles of the plastic bag onto a hook on the end of a long stick and slides a metal weight along the stick. “26.50元.” This tells me that carrots here are giant-sized and go for more than a dollar apiece. I point to his potatoes. “Bā yuán qián,” he says, oddly making a gun with his hand. It sounds like 8元, so I ignore his gesture and select two fist-sized, dirt-encrusted tubers. Green peppers find their way into my backpack too, and it all comes to 43元. I thank him warmly and move on.
A sweet rose fragrance wafts by my nostrils as I pass an incense vendor. Beside his scarlet sticks, a young woman stacks dozens of pale green gourds, each the length of my arm. I crouch beside her cloth and ask what they are. She looks shyly over my shoulder, to a woman selling mangosteens, bananas, and persimmons, and they exchange rapid bits of Cantonese. I squeeze one in my hand, trying to look intelligent, and it feels like a cucumber, only lighter and harder. She smiles but doesn’t speak. I select two of the gourds and employ my other well-worn phrase: “How much?” She tells me the price and inexplicably breaks into laughter as I pay. A neighbor of hers, a quieter woman, sells me garlic, oranges, and yellow onions.
At the end of the alley, salesmen lean languidly behind huge barrels of tofu. Then there’s a fish market, where long trout-like specimens sw
im about in giant pans. At egg stalls, people take eggs of all sizes and colors and hold them up to naked light bulbs before buying. I turn for home, and my nylon backpack chafes my shoulders in heavy, sweet, sweaty proof of my accomplishment—I did it! I smile, thinking about this commerce, this simple buying and selling that defies classification, that is neither communist nor capitalist, that is owned by no one era, land, culture, or nation.
Our dormitory awaits, stolid and forbidding. Gazing at its cage-like bars and gate, I realize I forgot my keys. A teenager is locking the metal gate. I approach hastily, and I realize he is actually unlocking the gate. For me. He waves me under the stairs to a room where he apparently lives, and he pulls a manila envelope from a stack of letters. The envelope is addressed in English—to me—and the envelope behind it is addressed to Paige. I take them both. He says nothing. He’s too old to be a student, and I finally get it—this is his job, he’s our gateman. I thank him.
Upstairs, I knock on our door and Byron, shirtless in the heat, lets me in. His long brown hair is pulled back with a rubber band. I tell him about our gateman as I unload the goods, shoving the veggies into our diminutive fridge. The manila envelope contains a Dave Matthews guitar book that I remember—with a sigh of pleasure—ordering for myself weeks ago from my faraway other world.
The bathroom smells of mildew and urine, but it’s time for a shower. The showerhead points directly onto the bathroom floor, and in one corner is a drainage hole big enough for small creatures to crawl through. The heater, despite a fat orange gas tube snaking towards the kitchen stove, doesn’t work, so the spray is a single unsoothing blast of cold. I shudder and bear it, remembering to let no drop pass my lips.
Byron goes to work in the kitchen. By the time I’m dried and dressed, he has the mini-stove fired up and a yellow pool of oil popping at the bottom of our emperor-sized wok. “Is oil supposed to smoke?” he asks, as thin black wisps climb heavenward. He dumps sliced onion into the oil, and the POP-POP-POP is replaced by a pleasant sizzle. I look at him and shrug. “Smells good!”
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 5
