“Sit,” I say, gesturing.
They sit.
Ah. Piece of cake.
Now I spend fifty minutes speaking with exaggerated volume and clarity, drawing maps and pictures on the chalkboard, miming and telling amusing stories with words of one syllable or less, students meanwhile staring perplexedly or else sleeping on their arms. Lil has said they all have had three to five years of English. I’m not sure they’ve had three to five years of Mandarin. Later on, I get the same impression of students in Rooms 406 and 301. It’s somewhat freeing, actually, as I can say anything I want. At one point, I find myself reciting the Gettysburg Address.
Finally, a bit dizzy from the exertion, I carry Lil’s clipboard back to the office she shares with the other four English teachers, all of them Chinese, and sprawl in her tiny chair.
Joe looks up from his computer screen, a cigarette going in the ashtray. “Julian, the students say you look very like your sister.”
I stare at Joe for a moment. “I’m pleased to hear that.”
Joe likes this reply. He goes back to his emails.
Head spinning, I fiddle with Lil’s papers for a few minutes, stealing occasional glances at the real teachers to see what they’re doing. Bobby is humming along with a DVD of the Peking Opera. Jeff is keying something into his computer. Trish’s chair is empty. Joe is stubbing out a cigarette in an ashtray crowded with butts.
Lil has no Monday afternoon classes, which means I’ve basically survived day one. On reflection, it could have gone considerably worse. My best moment may have come during the morning’s third class, when I ran out of memorized speeches and extemporized insults. “Very well,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Let’s rumba.” I began to dance in a little circle, right hand on my belly, left held aloft, gyrating beneath the blood-red flag. Perhaps expectedly, the room exploded into astonished shrieks and howls. One of the boys leapt flatfooted onto his desk and began to gyrate, tossing his head so that his comb-over reached his shoulder. The girls mostly screamed and covered their mouths. Two other boys jumped onto their desks.
Those kids couldn’t rumba worth a damn.
“Julian,” teacher Bobby says now, switching off the Peking Opera, “it’s time for lunch. You can go with Trish and me to the school lunchroom. Very economical.”
“Also very chip,” says Trish, lifting her purse.
Seconds later, Joe is locking the English faculty office behind us and I’m trying to keep up with Bobby and Trish, who are all but sprinting across the palm-lined campus, seeking every possible advantage over the white-over-blue herd moving clumsily in the same direction, every nostril filled with scents of cooked meats and simmering sauces. Even I’m getting excited. Trish slows a step to say, “Julian, please, how is your mother?”
“Senile,” I reply, beginning to pant, “but she’ll probably die soon.”
“Ah,” says Trish appreciatively. “Is also alive your father, too?”
I tell her I’ve no idea who, where, or if.
Trish wags her head sincerely. “You are so lucky have the beautiful sister like Lillian, always take care of your mother and father. Also very tall and fat.”
And chip, I want to say, as the crowd slows to squeeze itself through the double doors of the lunchroom. The aromas are so palpable now you could weigh them on a postal scale. Ahead of us, students are grabbing trays, soup spoons, and chopsticks before hurrying toward whatever food station that beckons, there to turn sideways and reach past the others to grab this entree and that.
The rice station catches my attention. It is an enormous barrel with several enormous metal serving spoons stuck like shovels into snow. It’s very white of course. Don’t bring up brown rice with the Chinese. They look at you as though you’re tragically ill-informed and not a little rude. Rice grows fluffy and white, just as you see it on the plate, and everyone knows it. For a moment I watch the boys heap mountains of the white, semi-congealed goo onto their melamine platters, piling up far more rice than I’d ever imagined a single person could eat at a sitting. A glance at the tables shows boys raking rice into their mouths with both hands, a spoon in one and chopsticks in the other, their faces lowered to plate level. I’ve seen this same thing on the street, where grunt laborers unable to afford anything more substantial sit along the sidewalk at lunchtime forcing down billowing clouds of the stuff.
I decide to pass on the rice. I also give the soup station a wide berth, though both Bobby and Trish are as happy as lottery winners to come away with brimming bowls of the stuff. I’m sorry. Soup is a woman’s idea of something to eat. Watered-down food. Oh give me some. I also pass on the slippery plastic chopsticks standing upright in a pail, preferring the wooden pair in my pants pocket. I end up with a plate of something resembling Chinese cabbage, a pasta dish with a beefy red sauce, and the main course which I think is a pork and spinach casserole. With cheese. And mayonnaise.
“You no get the soup?” says Trish, alarmed, as I join her and Bobby at the table.
“I no want the soup,” I reply.
“No?” asks Bobby, equally surprised. “In China, we say soup is wonderful for the health. I will get you some.”
“I don’t want any,” I say as Bobby hurries away.
“How was your first day of teach the Chinese students?” Trish asks with a bright smile.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” I tell her, removing the plates from my tray. “Tell me something. Do any of these kids know a single English word?”
“I don’t know,” Trish says happily, blowing across her soup spoon.
I look around. This lunchroom seems more or less identical to its American counterpart, minus the circulating armed security guards and drug-sniffing canines. I notice a refrigerator near the milk station—the Chinese are religious about milk consumption, though most of them are lactose-intolerant—whose glass door reveals ranks and files of chilled longneck Kingway beers.
That’s different.
Bobby returns with my soup. “Here you are, Julian. I also brought for you a spoon.”
“You really shouldn’t have.”
The spinach turns out to be some kind of seaweed, but the ground beef could actually be ground beef, however fortified with equal parts powdered duck’s egg and unfortunate neighborhood dog.
I learn from Bobby that he was a farmer before becoming an English teacher. “I was the first person in my family to have a real education. Really I was extremely lucky. Most farmers never have a chance to change their life.”
Trish gushes, “Bobby is very special teacher. Always have the highest—” She confers with her colleague for a moment. They decide on the word evaluations. She continues, “I think that Bobby can be very good government official.”
Bobby laughs modestly. “I’m not a member of the Chinese Communist Party, so there’s no possibility of that. I don’t care. I have a good career teaching in the school, and soon I will retire.”
According to Lil, most Chinese schoolteachers are in it for the little incentives doled out regularly by headmasters. Corruption, I think it’s called. At the better Chinese schools—this is not one of them—before grades go out, teachers are inundated with fat red envelopes full of cash from parents. Tucked inside are gushy thank-you notes carefully spelling out the name of the little tyke in question. Not that the American Teacher is entitled to any such perks; still, one can only intuit that there could be the occasional little cutie just really in need of an A. Though how one might know she is both female and a cutie is a question unto itself, given the identical parachutes the students wear, and the fact that the girls employ not the least trace of make-up. Theoretically, the short ones are the boys. The shorter ones, the girls.
Bobby and Trish top off their meal with fresh apples, Bobby using a folding knife from his pocket to carefully remove their skins. Afterward we place our trays on a wet conveyor belt and stroll back toward the English faculty office, for which Bobby possesses a personal key. I take a seat at Lil’s de
sk and watch Trish and Bobby pull folding cots from behind their desks and pop them open. Within five minutes, each is snoring. I take a look at my watch. Quarter of one.
Miller time.
As I tiptoe away from the English faculty office, I encounter Joe walking the other way, keys in hand.
“Julian,” he says blandly, “tonight there is a dinner in your honor. I will call your room at six o’clock.”
“Uh, actually, I always take a nap at six o’clock.”
“I will wake you up,” he says pertly.
“How… perfect.”
Joe likes this reply.
I return to Lillian’s apartment with a massive frontal headache and a whole new appreciation for solitude.
She has till Wednesday.
Chapter Eighteen
“Tonight you will eat a real Chinese meal,” says Joe.
You worry when you hear this.
Joe translates his words for the five others gathered on the busy sidewalk in front of Shenzhen High School of Electronic Excellence. They all look at me and laugh.
“In your honor,” adds Joe, grinning, and I do my best to blush.
Beyond his proficiency in English, what distinguishes Joe from the sea of other five-foot-four Chinese men is hair count. You couldn’t part the man’s hair with a howitzer round. Interestingly, Joe is the head of the English Department. I thought you’d like that. I had an opportunity earlier today to study his teaching methodology. Joe assigns sentences for the students to copy from the chalkboard then stands outside the open door to smoke cigarettes and talk on his phone.
On the sidewalk before us, two women walk by in gauze masks and surgical gloves, and the dinner party murmurs uneasily for a couple of minutes before Joe turns to me importantly and says, “Those women were wearing something to protect themselves. There is a rumor of some kind of bad disease in Guangzhou, but the government says there is no danger.” Now he beams for me.
Color me reassured.
Outside China’s Great Wall of disinformation, the disease that doesn’t exist is called atypical pneumonia. It’s all over the internet. Sudden onset, acute pulmonary crisis, and according to the latest round-up of neighborhood rumors, shockingly high mortality. In this country where straight information can be scarce, rumor is a palpable thing. You feel it moving through the city like a wind. With the close of Spring Festival, a hundred million Chinese are freshly returned from family visits in crowded filthy trains, bringing atypical God-knows-what with them. But there’s nothing to worry about.
The dinner party continues to stand on the busy sidewalk, gawking nowhere in particular, evidently awaiting someone.
Ralpho emailed me today. He’s coming for a visit. He says he wants to look for a job. And probably sniff around for vegetarians. He promises to treat me to as much dim sum and beer as I can reasonably handle. Still I don’t know. That guy has got to snore.
“Ju-wen?”
I turn to view the timid approach of Marilyn, a divorcée who teaches night courses in English to phone-company employees in the high-rise office building.
“Ju-wen, so nice I see you,” Marilyn sings through her nose. “Is your first day of classes. You no have the problem?”
“No have the single one. And how was your day, Marilyn?”
She thinks for a moment and her eyelids flutter. “I think also very good. I go see my son now, cook the dinner. Here, I give you my telephone number so if you have the problem.” She begins scrawling.
“You already gave me your telephone number.”
“But you no call me.”
“That’s because you gave it to me an hour ago.”
Marilyn’s eyes all but close as she giggles. “Ju-wen, you so naughty. Also you so fat like your sister.” Handing me the note, she says, “Please, thank you very much.”
“Also you as well, too.”
Marilyn departs, and the men follow her with their eyes and guffaw discreetly. Finally the last couple arrives, late and perspiring. It turns out they, like the others Joe has selected for this dinner party in my honor, originate from his home province, speak no English, and have no idea who the white giant is.
“Let’s go,” says Joe, tossing a cigarette and herding us toward the maw of a nearby alley.
Tree was recently treated to a real Chinese meal. The menu featured, among other things, pigeon, cockroach, civet cat—think mongoose with severe ADD—and a delicacy known as Three Screams. That would be a living, tightly bound, skinless rat. The rat, it’s said, screams once when lifted with the chopsticks, again when dipped in vinegar, and a third time when bitten into. Which seems reasonable enough to me. I hope we are not en route to that particular variety of real Chinese meal. I’ve heard, as well, about a Shenzhen restaurant that specializes in yewei, or exotic meats. The more endangered the species, the higher the price. Crocodile, sturgeon, anteater, barking deer, it’s all on the menu. Along with, I think, forearm of Panchen Lama.
The dinner party trails Joe through a maze of crumbling masonry, past an assemblage of Astroturf-topped billiard tables. The latter are surrounded by the dead-eyed pupils of our fine school. Other white-over-blue youths sit at poker, cigarettes dripping from their faces. Joe pretends not to see the students as he leads us into an even drearier alley of parked motorcycles, wandering chickens, a balding cat, and two or three shirtless old men. And isn’t that someone asleep on that pile of lumber? Wherever you go in China, there’s someone asleep with his mouth open.
Joe stops at what seems a totally random spot. Nothing anywhere suggests that we’ve arrived at an eating establishment, but the women of the party begin haranguing two disheveled men, who after a while drag a table out of an anonymous door. Another table is jammed against it, followed by ten un-matching chairs. The two workmen seem disoriented and disgruntled, as though they’ve never had to do anything like this before.
Just bring the beer.
Is it just me, or are pleasures spaced rather far apart in this country? Either you’re really into food, or there’s basically nothing for you here. I’m told that gambling, vice, addiction, abomination—the whole good list—is readily available at nearby Macao, a British/Chinese attempt to concoct a Monaco of the Pacific. My own personal tastes favor revolving women. You can have the revolving wheels.
The dinner party in my honor at last takes its seats, myself first. The ground is hopelessly uneven, and none of the chairs sit level. A young waitress appears, and instantly she is set upon by the women of the party who begin to dictate every detail of the dishes we are to receive, including when and how each is to appear at table. This goes on for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, eyes and voices sharpening until it appears that the young tramp of a waitress will be seized and tied with her own hair and forced to sing like Freddie Fender.
That would be nice.
I tune out, setting my elbows on the table and watching various neighbors straggle past, cigarettes hanging from their mouths at the Chinese sixty-degree cant. They’re staring at us like this is no restaurant, man, this is a dirty-ass alley.
Just bring the beer.
Meanwhile I revisit certain visual memories of that money-scented Memphis night, that single-night Satyricon. How truly delightful: a secret gaming society that conducts a hundred percent of its nefarious activities within the exclusive and securely gated compounds of its members. This month, Boulder. Next month, Barbados. Or perhaps Shenzhen?
My mind settles on what could be my favorite memory of all: rotating box number two. Rocking back in my plastic chair, I let go a sigh and recall the sight of a dirty blond who’d never gone anywhere near the sun in her life, nor the gym, nor should she have, for here was a woman who under no circumstance should ever leave the bedroom. Her full lips begged for red lipstick. The two breasts were certainly showy enough, but my eyes chose to follow a vector between the semi-parted thighs to a shadowed space, a disappearing depth, an inward-plunging center line quite soon to deliver inquiring minds to the crux of the matt
er. As she slowly revolved, the spotlights increasingly threatened to violate that shadowed space, that nest of tawny hairs, and though they never fully succeeded, my eyes were rewarded with a cogent visual understanding of how and, I thought, why a woman’s central contours cling ever more urgently to their own plummeting depths.
It’s awful, this work. Being the narrator. Captive to each terrible detail.
There were two black models that warm Memphis night, and I particularly enjoyed how the honeyed light met their skin, flattening the sheen and lifting each pore for my personal inspection. There is no skin like African-American skin, especially that milk-chocolate mid-tone between high and low yaller, the texture practically mythical in its perfection. The first of those women summoned First Dynasty Egypt with her sharp bones, owlish eyes, and sanguine glow. The second had abs like a waffle-iron, yet despite all the crunches, her belly was feverishly feminine, its dipping lines grabbing the eye and funneling it along past the tidy, vertical navel. Every visual artist is taught to do this, yet few learn to pull the eye along an inexorable course to a compelling singularity that at the same moment absorbs the rapt attention and recycles it along emerging lines that shoot you out only to circle you back in again exactly as do a woman’s hips.
You don’t find a lot of installations like that in Memphis, naked women on rotating boxes. Though, of course, this was just the antechamber, the warm-up act, the appetizer. The real attraction lay not in the Miles Room at all but in a far more lavishly turned-out space just beyond.
Joe turns to me. “Do you want some fish?”
Sure. Why not?
“Do you want some chicken?”
Okay. Whatever.
“Do you want some pork?”
I stare at him. I’m trying to be agreeable here. Just bring me something to eat.
A few minutes later, “Do you want some beef?”
I tell him I want some beer.
“Okay,” says Joe.
The Year of the Hydra Page 18
