The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  The Emperor of Shoes

  Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Lost and searching, Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, absorbing the generations-old secrets of the trade from his loving but neurotic father. As Alex explores the plant’s vast floors and assembly lines he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex’s own father is engaging in payoffs and bribes to protect the bottom line. Then he meets a seamstress named Ivy.

  As Alex and Ivy grow close, Alex’s sympathies begin to shift. But when Ivy’s past resurfaces, her broader goals become apparent. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow laborers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite?

  Drawing on his own experiences living and working in southern China, Spencer Wise explores the evolution of a precarious Jewish family empire as it struggles to adapt in a global landscape. Deftly plotted and vibrantly drawn, The Emperor of Shoes is a timely meditation on idealism, ambition, father-son rivalry and cultural revolution set against a vivid backdrop of social and technological change.

  The Emperor of Shoes

  A NOVEL

  Spencer Wise

  for my dad

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  IT’S A BRIGHT moon outside, and from the window of my house I can see the skeletal gray of the factory, the banners draped like sashes and the deep arterial red of Mandarin characters demanding change, and I’m wondering how the fuck this Jewish kid from Boston could somehow wind up a YouTube hero in the Chinese Revolution.

  I’m standing by the window thinking about Jews and shoes and this beautiful Chinese woman asleep behind me.

  Ivy.

  I should go to her now. Crawl into bed and wrap her in my arms.

  But I don’t move.

  I see my face half-dissolved in the glass. My own eyes reflected back.

  So this is the place I came to first for my father. Guangdong, where Dad has made shoes for what feels like forever. South China. This country that my father embraced. In his own demented way, of course. He wanted me here. But not here here, as in this moment, on the night of the protests.

  Something else must’ve brought me to this country. Because I ended up someplace I never would’ve expected. Nor my father. Nor any of us.

  It’s quiet in the house, but I can still hear the workers chanting. What a sound. They listened to us, didn’t they? The workers. And tomorrow more people will listen and see on YouTube.

  I brace myself against the window frame and turn back to Ivy on the bed. I can see her clearly, bluing in the moonlight behind me, twisted in the white sheet. She’s knitting her brow the way she does when she calls me on my bullshit—of which there’s plenty—and her lips are moving silently as if she’s still shouting into the megaphone, dreaming of what we’ve been through.

  But I never could have anticipated her being here in my bed.

  I know her, don’t I? I’ve been to her village, to Beijing—places sacred to her.

  But there’s always something out of reach. Some feeling that even as well as I know her now, I’m not sure I know her at all.

  I turn back to the window.

  Palm trees in the yard, trunks white with lime. Rain dripping off the broad leaves. A scrungy cat hiding in the hollow of a banyan tree.

  I can’t sleep.

  Dad’s over at the hotel in Nanhai and maybe he’s in the tub and the water’s rushing up, the faucet steams, the water rises, lapping at the sides, spilling over onto the white tiles. The water keeps rising until it’s right under his nose, even with the lip of the tub, and he says to Karri, “Shut it off.”

  But you’re kidding yourself, Pops. There’s no shutting it off now.

  There are decisions to make by sunrise. My father. Ivy.

  This world is opening. Has opened. It’s not the closed little plant that my father built. It’s a different world, the one I’m going to be living in, and I don’t understand my place in it.

  A Jew. Is that what I am? I don’t know. Maybe I’m the schmuck who lost China. Who ruined everything.

  What does that even mean here in China? To be a Jew. I’m now a citizen of the world? We’ve always been citizens of the world. No, that’s not true. We’ve always been outsiders. On the run.

  But where to?

  I turn away from the window and I walk over to the bed and sit on the edge of the mattress with my back to Ivy.

  And I think: it was just her and me and whatever passed between us on her grandmother’s houseboat. The beginning, for us, for everything. That much I know, even if the rest is not very clear. It was Ivy and me sitting back-to-back on a tin-roofed houseboat on the Pearl River with a nuclear power plant vanishing in the dusk along the far bank, while her grandmother cleaned a chicken and threw the feathers overboard.

  1

  IVY WAS A stitcher from the sample room and a former organizer at Tiananmen. Her name of course is not Ivy but Hanjia Liu, a name I was always botching, my up-tones down, or down up, and even though I very badly wanted to say it correctly, it wound up being this terrible mystery in my mouth.

  I felt her damp back against mine, a heat spreading along her spine—this was more than we’d ever touched. I wanted to reach back and take her hand, but I knew this wasn’t a date. It was very hot. Sitting there quietly was enough. Dayenu. That drippy Passover song triggered on reflex. It would have been enough. The lie of gratitude. Everyone wants more.

  Suddenly I felt the weight of Ivy’s hair lifted off my shoulders, a coolness on my neck, and without turning around I knew she had put up her hair in a hastily swirled bun without any sort of tie as she always did before she ate. She handed me a piece of dragon fruit, and I bit it, crisp and light, crunched on the tiny black seeds. Before the sweetness on my lips evaporated, her hand was beside my ear again, another pearly white slice pinched between her index and middle fingers. Already she had sewing knuckles, bony red swelling in the joints below her nails. I took the fruit. We ate in silence. I had the urge to fill it with any old nonsense, just to hear noise, terrified by the calmness like a boot on my chest. If only there was a way to stay in that moment. Of course I couldn’t. I had to face my father. Ivy said she didn’t want to make me choose between them, between a father and a dagongmei, a migrant, working girl.

  I had to get back; I was going to be late to meet him for dinner at the hotel. A whole afternoon had quietly slipped past since I got on the back of Ivy’s motorbike at the shoe factory like a lunatic who wants to get kidnapped, as my father would say, and she took me here to her grandmother’s riverboat on the eve of the Tomb Sweeping holiday when it’s expected that all children come home.

  The way out was climbing onto one of the Styrofoam block rafts and ferrying myself to shore and taking Ivy’s motorbike back to the hotel where my father was likely tying an Izod pullover around his waist, slipping into boat
shoes and dabbing a swale of Neosporin under each nostril so he didn’t catch a cold because China is the last place to fuck around. And unbeknownst to my father but very beknownst to Ivy, his own security guards, for an extra fifty yuan, had slid Ivy’s leaflets for a new workers’ union under the doors at the dormitories. But as long as I sat there in the old tin-roofed houseboat, as long as I stayed put and focused on what was in front of me, I was fine. The moment I moved I became a traitor.

  Enough already. I rose to my feet, my legs numb from sitting so long, and as I was punching my thighs to get the blood flowing, Ivy bickered with her grandmother in Chinese. I swung my leg over the gunwale and my foot touched the Styrofoam block, this makeshift raft in the water that would take me the fifty yards to shore. Ivy handed me the ferry pole, warning that it wasn’t as easy as it looked, balancing on this block not much wider than my shoulders. Now I had both feet down, wobbling badly, and I paddled in long strokes like a ferryman. I felt the whole village’s eyes on me, the weight of expectation. My father had probably left for dinner without me, and he was already at the churrascaria in the hotel yelling fish! at the waiters carrying swords of lamb. The Emperor demanded fish, not treif. Dad had as much religion as you’d find in a pork bun, but that wouldn’t stop him from invoking God if that fish didn’t come snappy.

  The raft teetered to the left, dipped below the waterline, and I was squatting flat-footed and spread-kneed as I’d seen the fishermen do; it was a position you had to learn in China to survive. There was no reason I couldn’t. On the top of my thighs I felt a good burn and an ache building in my knees, but you couldn’t stand up, no one did. I made twenty yards without too much problem when my knees began to quake. I felt eyes on me. But I couldn’t go back, couldn’t lose face even in front of strangers.

  So I kept dipping the pole into the water and pulling it along the length of my body, but the burn in my knees turned to a violent tremble, and I stood. One moment, my shoulders squared to the shore, the next I’d fallen off the raft, straight into my father’s poison. Our poison. This river roiling with chrome and lime, sulfur and soda ash. It’s nasty business, boy. For a moment I saw it coming right up to my face like black syrup, a hard sheen, and then I hit on my right side. Under. The water singeing my nostrils. Lye. I tucked my chin to my chest and blew out through my nose. Eyes sealed tight, lips too, but a taste of rust bled through, a drop of silver on the tip of my tongue. Blackness and terror. The knock of the tip of my sneaker against something hard. Drag of my heavy clothes, as if the river was going to swallow me, draw me deeper. One arm was quick to fly up while the other scraped to the side, my legs, too, out of sync, lost in my own body thrashing for the surface. A burn in my lungs. My blood screamed.

  My head broke free. I took a huge breath and I heard the village laughing and yelling, gweilo! Ghost man in Cantonese. In the factory everyone was known by their job: heel puller, freight girl, fecalist, glue mixer, and I was the Head of Development, but as soon as I stepped outside the factory I was gweilo and had been from the start a year ago. A heavy ammoniac smell wafted off the water as I swam, lifting my chin high, to the cement landing on the shore, not ten feet from a yawning corrugated metal sewage pipe.

  A Chinese man in a white pressed shirt and slacks stood on the landing with his kid and wife who was lifting her long skirt slightly off the wet slab. The husband waved RMB bills in the air, shouting to the boats for fresh carp, and I tried not to think about that fish coming out of the same river. But I was glad he was there, because the houseboats tacked over to business mode and forgot me. Reaching into their pails, the fishermen hooked a finger into the gills of the carp, and held them high above their heads, tails flapping, for the customer to choose.

  I hauled myself out of the water onto the landing right beside the city man who took one glance and said, Ah, ah, ah, then went right back to haggling, as if nothing unusual happened: another fully clothed gweilo crawling out of the river. On top of the steep bank, Ivy’s motorbike, an old Honda CG125 with a bright orange fuel tank, leaned up against the skeleton of a Russian Tupolev plane, crash-landed and abandoned in a bramble of bamboo and vine, and stripped clean as a scalded pig, a steel carcass with the iron beams curved like whale bones. Most of the roofs on the houseboats were scrabbled together with aluminum paneling from the plane. These were China’s first commercial planes, the ones my father rode from Beijing to Guangzhou, bucking and diving under inexperienced hands, falling from the sky all over the country.

  One of the men on the bank loading his flatbed with crates of lychee stopped to throw me a fishy towel from the cab of his truck. A coarse rag with deep crimson stains, sparkle of scales and a heavy scent. But he was watching me closely, so I wiped myself down, leaving my face alone, and tossed it back. Reeking of fish guts and dehairing chemicals was not how I wanted to show up late to dinner with my father. But if I got right on the bike and hurried then maybe I’d have time to change, though, by now, he was probably done with his meal and reaching his hand over the glass sneeze-guard of the Häagen-Dazs cart with the sign on top that reads Ice Cream: Messiah of Happiness and scooping himself a big bowl of French vanilla while one of the waitresses rushed across the room, waving her hands over her head and apologizing for neglecting him. Oh, now you come running?

  I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket but of course it was dead. The last text message from my father received a few hours ago had read: “ERA?‚” and I’d sent back, “In Little League? About 7.25. 10 if I was crying.” He’d meant ETA of course, but I’d silenced the phone after that, so whatever he wrote back was a mystery.

  Turning to Ivy’s motorbike, I lifted the choke, pulled the clutch and slammed my foot down on the kick start, all in the order that she’d taught me. I waved one last time to Ivy, who was standing on the bow of the boat. Aside from her, I think the whole village was ready for me to leave.

  Ivy had lied to her grandmother and pretended I was her boyfriend. “A white boyfriend is better than nothing,” she’d said to me. Her family called her sheng nu, a leftover woman, she’d told me, while we were eating at the BBQ street stalls outside the market in Li Shui, not far from the factory. That’s where we first started talking, over oysters with garlic, chicken feet, pork sausage.

  “Unwanted,” she whispered, and I thought, That’s crazy, you’re not unwanted by me. I bet a hell of a lot of people want you.

  I’d figured she wasn’t more than twenty-four, but who knew. I didn’t pretend to understand Chinese culture. Maybe twenty-four was late. Or maybe she was much older and I couldn’t tell.

  “Is your family originally from down here?” I asked.

  “Yes. But I have business in Beijing.”

  “Business.”

  “Yes.”

  She left it vague. Maybe she meant an ex-husband. Or maybe she was married. I didn’t want to push.

  “It’s nice?” I asked. “Beijing. I haven’t been yet.”

  “It’s changed.”

  “Since?”

  Ivy tightened up. She stared at me. Didn’t blink or look away.

  “Tiananmen,” she said.

  “You mean—” And then I stopped myself because it was obvious that’s what she meant. I straightened up in my chair. Thinking about 1989, trying to do the math in my head. Was she forty? She could be. Even with me figuring she was twenty-four she could be forty. I looked harder and there was a puckering around the eyes, a wrinkle—no, I was making all that up. There were no signs. You wouldn’t know. Maybe if you were Chinese and you knew where to look. But not me.

  “So you were young,” I said. “When everything—”

  She nodded. “I am thirty-six.”

  She wasn’t shy about it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Then I tapped myself on the forehead. “Not about thirty-six. About the other—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, smiling.

  I turned away from her. />
  A few tables down, a girl was taking the extensions out of her friend’s hair. It was like she was reaching into the roots and peeling off these wide wefts of stiff black hair, and I suddenly had this flash of one of my mother’s wigs—one of these sheitels she wore once she’d gone full-blown Orthodox—hanging on the bedpost, its bald owner smoking by the window.

  I looked back at Ivy.

  Her hair was her own. Real. I was thinking about what had happened in that decade, that black hole between us, whatever it was she’d seen. She knew things, more than me, and I wanted to know everything, and suddenly I was thinking about her hair falling forward into my face and her lips hovering above mine and somehow I ended up saying, “I’m younger.”

  She laughed. “I know.”

  “I’m twenty-six,” I said. I should’ve lied. Tried thirty-one on her.

  “You wouldn’t remember—you’re too young.”

  Tiananmen she meant. It took me a second because I was thinking about what she called me. “I do a little,” I lied. “Some things. I remember my father talking.”

  She drew back, but she didn’t answer. She wound up changing topics. I read that as her way of saying there was too much between us.

  But on the riverboat, I knew Ivy had used me to give her grandmother hope, and the truth was I didn’t mind being used as long as I was useful to her. Since her grandmother disliked Americans and the British for political reasons, I’d played, at Ivy’s suggestion, an inspired Australian language teacher, faultlessly rendered, every stereotype I could recall, until the grandmother told me I sounded nothing like the Australian missionary stationed at her house when she was ten. Ivy had translated this to me and finished by saying, “She spent a lot of time with him, and she doesn’t think you sound Australian.”

  “What happened to ‘She’ll buy anything’?” I asked.

  “I forgot about Australia,” Ivy said. “Sorry. But don’t make frowns or she’ll know she caught us. Can you do a Switzerland accent? I promise she does not know about Switzerland.”