The Cost of Hope

by Amanda Bennett

  When he talks about his work for the association, he is dead serious. He visits farms. He talks with farmers. He finds American experts at extension schools and brings them to China to teach the Chinese how to use soybeans to fatten their pigs, raise more chickens, farm fish, bottle soymilk.

  Yet still I worry that all this is a cover for something darker. The worst times come when he senses I really need to know. Sometimes I grow nearly frantic. “Terence, I’m a journalist. If I’m hanging around with a spy, I could be in big trouble. You have to tell me …”

  “I can’t talk about that,” he says, with an exaggerated deadpan air of mystery.

  Eventually I conclude he is simply trying to annoy me.

  One night at a fancy party at the British embassy, he wins a raffle. As he walks up to collect his prize, a free weekend in Hong Kong, some unknown voice behind me shouts: “Spook!” It sets my rage off anew. When he returns to the table full of plans for our newly acquired upcoming vacation, I refuse to speak to him.

  We fight constantly. We fight from the moment we meet. We fight over meals. We fight in the car. We fight in the shower. We fight in bed. We trail each other down the street, each of us desperate to lose the other but more desperate not to lose the argument. We are blunt. We are not kind.

  “You’re not going out looking like that,” he says. “You look like a bag lady.” Me: “Only dorks wear bow ties.” He thinks a friend who goes to work for a tobacco company must be banned from our lives; I think expressing disapproval is sufficient. I think my acquaintances are catholic and eclectic. He thinks I consort too readily with jerks. Edna St. Vincent Millay is a feminist genius. “She’s a castrating bitch,” he says. I think he gets worked up over nothing. He thinks journalists believe in nothing. I mock his speech—fireplug (It’s a hydrant!). UM-brella. He mocks mine—coo-pon (Everyone knows it’s kyoo-pon!). Roooo-f instead of ruh-f.

  At Thanksgiving, I pull out a precious yellow cardboard box of Bell’s Seasoning. I am pleased with myself. I have had the forethought to pack it with my incoming supplies. The smell of the ground thyme and sage, and the early morning toasting of the bread for stuffing is, for me, Thanksgiving and Christmas and home. We are going to stuff a scrawny chicken and pretend it is a turkey.

  “You’re not putting that chemical shit in my bird,” he says.

  MY bird? MY bird? Since when is it HIS bird? He has insulted me and attacked my childhood traditions. I, it turns out, have assaulted his sense of elegance. Stuffing is called “dressing” and it is created in a different manner every year. Prunes. Apricots (which he pronounces AY-pricots, not the proper AH-pricots). Almonds. Oysters. Ground sausage, or simmered giblets. And by the way, while it’s proper to eat turkey at Thanksgiving—that’s traditional—NO ONE eats turkey at Christmas. The correct Christmas meal is either a goose or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Bell’s Seasoning plays no role in any of these holiday imaginings.

  “We’re not using this garbage,” he says.

  I snatch up the box, throw it at his head, and stomp out. I spend the next hour smoking and sulking on the street, while the usual curious crowd forms around me.

  In truth, the reality of life in China has everyone on edge. For journalists every interview is a tedious ballet staged in meeting rooms with dozens of people arrayed in fat armchairs pushed back against the walls. Paying every bill takes an hour or more, carrying a wad of cash to a crowded office, standing in one line to pay, one to get a ticket for having paid, and back to the original line for the actual receipt. Phone connections are distant and tinny and cut off abruptly more often than they work.

  The soybean association that Terence is working for is a government contractor that must meticulously account for every second of the day and every penny spent; I am working for a woman of temperament and ambition in whose eyes I can seemingly do nothing right. Yet she herself knows little about China and often makes absurd demands in the middle of the night. Her ignorance and impetuousness infuriate Terence. He rails on my behalf at stupid bosses all over the world.

  He scares me with the way he talks to his own boss back home in the United States. I overhear him shouting into the phone across a 6,800-mile divide.

  “No, I will NOT.”

  Silence.

  “You will not do any such thing.”

  Silence.

  “Goddammit. This is MY office, not yours.”

  He slams down the phone.

  I am aghast. You are rude, reckless, undiplomatic, I say. You are spineless, he says. We fight about bosses. We fight about shouting. We fight about fighting.

  We fight about jealousy. Just weeks before coming to China—about eight months before I met Terence—I divorced the man I had been with since I was nineteen years old. Before Terence and I met, I was alone in China, halfway around the world, unmoored, more emotionally strafed than I had expected or had the resources to deal with. Far from home, I had already flung myself into destructive, blindingly wrong, inappropriate relationships that had torn me up inside, and whose lingering traces were snaking through our lives.

  This is my problem, I say, not yours. You’re killing me, he says. This is none of your business, I say. It’s nothing BUT my business. But I am NOT marrying you. In any case, you’re still married yourself. Aha! Trump card! For that is one of the minor biographical details that has recently emerged. Terence is not yet divorced. That’s done, he says. Done. We’ve split up. In fact, he has been living here alone in China since 1980, never even asking his wife to visit. It is now 1984. In his view, he has been a single man for nearly four years now. She’s still your wife, I say.

  Every little thing cuts one or the other of us like a razor. Two wineglasses on a sink. An unanswered phone at midnight. A dropped voice. A stray photograph. An unexplained postmark. Ordinary actions—whether badly understood, misunderstood, or understood only too clearly—become sanity-threatening betrayals. Our emotions are toxic. Powerful. Colliding. I have never met anyone before who can cause me so much pain. It will be a decade before I fully realize that the same can be said for my effect on him.

  I do my job. I live on a farm to see the effects of Deng Xiaoping’s agricultural reforms. I visit factories. Bathhouses. Peking opera. President Reagan comes to visit. So does Nixon.

  Terence does his job. The goal of the American Soybean Association is, of course, to get the Chinese to buy more soybeans from American farmers. Terence’s goal is nothing of the sort. He has nothing but contempt for the businessmen (he says it like one would say “terrorist” or “prostitute”) who want to profit from an underfed country. “I want to feed hungry people,” he says.

  There are hundreds of millions of hungry people in China. Even in the relatively well-nourished city, men are so thin their belts loop all the way around their narrow bodies and flap out the back. Workmen fall asleep on every possible surface. Cinder blocks. Piles of metal shavings. Few are getting entirely enough to eat, and certainly not enough protein. Terence thinks soy can change all that. Pigs are fed on table scraps, so he sets up pilot programs, raising sets of scrawny piglets on the traditional diet side by side with soy-fed animals that grow big and robust. He brings in new varieties of swine, bred for protein and away from fat. He brings in experts on chickens and eggs. He knows the proper composition of a chicken’s diet in winter, and the proper composition in summer. He knows how to say “artificial insemination” and “ribonucleic acid” in Chinese. He travels to the south to teach aquaculture. To the north to help create bean curd plants. To the west to consider cattle.

  Back in Beijing, his apartment is always full of strays. American students live in Chinese dorms, cold, with communal showers and toilets and little entertainment. I never know who I am going to find curled up in front of a movie eating his treats, or stepping out of the shower. On the street, he stops strangers, asking the proper pronunciation of odd words, trying out phrases on them. His American extension school experts are fond of down-home expressions. Terence is constantly
looking for ways to translate. “He hit it out of the park.” “He’s a stand-up guy.”

  He pursues strange hobbies. One day I see him leave his room with a net, a jar, and a bizarre contraption with a mouthpiece and a double set of tubes.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I’m collecting bugs. Nobody has sent insect samples from China to the Smithsonian for decades.” He walks up to some bushes beside the hotel, points the funnel-shaped cone at the end of one tube at an unwary insect, and sucks sharply on the other tube. Bernoulli’s principle creates a swirling vacuum that whooshes the bug into the jar in the middle. When he has several samples, he preserves them and ships them off. “Terence is off sucking bugs,” I tell our friends.

  He makes me order evening gowns tailored at the Friendship Store, one a shimmering burgundy full-skirted silk, another an aquamarine fitted sheath with spaghetti straps.

  “Put on the burgundy dress,” he says one evening. “We’re going out.”

  He arrives at my apartment dressed in full white tie. A black tailcoat. White cummerbund and patent leather shoes. A cane with an engraved silver knob. A top hat. He takes my arm. A Japanese restaurant has just opened in an old courtyard house. We sit at the bar eating sushi and drinking beer. Then, looking just like Fred Astaire, he leads me regally past the other gaping diners, my silk dress sweeping the floor.

  He woos me with rabbits and song.

  I don’t remember how the business about the bunnies began. Maybe as an offhanded, sarcastic “none of your business” kind of comment. In any case, it becomes a truism between us that the reason my first husband, Philip, and I divorced was that I wanted a rabbit and he would never get me one. It becomes a mindless, repetitive joke that I mouth every time—and it is often—he speaks of marriage.

  “When are we going to get married?”

  “You haven’t given me my rabbit yet. After what I’ve been through how can I marry another man who won’t give me a bunny?”

  It feels particularly cold that December 1984. In Beijing in winter the wind whips down from Mongolia like a spear, bringing with it the red dust of the Gobi Desert. When the wind blows you can’t see across the street. Cyclists don face masks. The office furniture grows a grainy patina of desert sand and coal dust that must be wiped twice a day. Outside it is freezing. Inside, the office is overheated. I have my office door half closed, trying desperately to hear a telephone call through the static. I hear a commotion in the hall. I rise up, intending to close the door fully, when it flings open. Terence is wearing a green People’s Liberation Army coat with the typical fake fur collar. The army hat with earflaps is pulled down low over his forehead. A scarf hides most of his face. He is carrying a cardboard box. He drops the box on my desk and stomps out.

  Inside is not one bunny, but two. The little creatures are no bigger than my fist, with tiny ears the size of my pinkies. I can tell they are white, but just barely, through the thick orange dust that cakes them. Terence has spent the morning riding his bicycle, his own top-of-the-line Flying Pigeon, through freezing Beijing, crisscrossing the narrow hutongs, stopping to shout into the courtyards: Anyone in here raise rabbits? The bunnies move to the enclosed patio outside my office, where they grow fat on vegetable scraps and soybeans.

  His work takes him away for long periods of time. He returns to the United States every other month, driving teams of Chinese farmers across the United States, observing U.S. farms, eating with American farmers, listening to translated lectures on essential minerals. While he is gone, I often receive strange letters. One is from a salesman of Chinese herbal medicine, promising me relief from headaches, bad skin, and “lady monthly cramp” if I only buy his brew of snake and dog penis. Another is from an eight-year-old, so excited about her first visit to China that she is sitting on the plane using pencils to practice eating with chopsticks.

  Yet another day, I am sitting in my office when Miss Wang, my interpreter, comes in, a frightened look on her face.

  “Amanda, does someone wish you harm?”

  That morning a letter came in, written entirely in a beautiful Chinese script. I can’t read Chinese, so I passed it on to her. As is her habit, she produces a neat translation on lined paper.

  Oh! My friends!

  My friends who live in the city alongside the River!

  There is big trouble coming your way!

  Yes, I assure you, trouble is on its way to this city.

  It is the ball game.

  The ball game will bring you this trouble!

  I read the message slowly, myself totally puzzled. Then I burst out laughing. The city alongside the river? River City! There’s trouble in River City! Terence had translated Harold Hill’s song from The Music Man into Chinese and mailed it to me from the road.

  His trips also rip both of us in two. There is no easy phone contact back to the United States—calls must be booked far ahead, sometimes as much as twenty-four hours in advance. He’s seldom in one location long enough for us to talk. Since we fight constantly, every trip is an opportunity for two weeks of unresolved misery. After one fight, he flees my apartment. Furious, I wait till the following day, the eve of his departure, to call. No answer. Ten minutes later. No answer. No answer. No answer. No answer. I run the ten blocks to the Jianguo and find him madly packing, the phone pulled out of the wall.

  I am unhappy when he is around. I am miserable when he is gone. I drive him to the airport and sit in the parking lot watching him go. I cry and cry and cry. How will I survive Beijing for the next ten days? The last day is the hardest. If I can make it to bedtime, then I can sleep. When I wake up in the morning, I can leave right away for the airport. He will be in at eleven. The phone rings at midnight. “I’ve missed my plane,” in San Francisco. It will be twenty-four hours till the next one. How will I fill the hours till then? Time crawls. Work weighs heavy. The hours between dark and dawn are leaden. Sometimes I awaken suddenly at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. When he is gone, I am alone, and the black night is mine to fill with nothing.

  Do I love him? Do I hate him? I can barely tell the difference. I do know that I need him, and I’m pretty sure I don’t like that fact at all. On his forty-fifth birthday in 1985 I don the burgundy silk dress again, low cut and shimmering. “Put on your tux,” I command. “Meet me at this corner.” I name an intersection at the very edge of the area where foreigners are allowed to visit.

  At 5:00 p.m., I go to fetch him there and find him standing at the dusty crossroads in the September chill. Bicycles zip past him. Peasants are sitting by the side of the road selling vegetables off spread-out blankets. Three-wheel motor carts, called san lun che, tootle past, filled with metal shavings, lengths of pipe, pyramids of cabbages, bolts of burlap. Terence’s tuxedo pants are nicely creased, his shoes perfectly polished.

  We are just outside the Summer Palace, the country retreat that the Empress Dowager Cixi starved the Chinese navy of its silver to perfect. In September, the palace’s Kunming Lake is slate flat and clear, reflecting Longevity Hill on its surface. There is nothing that looks more like the China of Terence’s dreams than the Summer Palace. Stacked pagodas with their rounded tops are tucked into the elbows of the surrounding hills. Branches curve delicately down to the water. As night falls, a light fog hovers on the lake’s surface.

  My time in China is growing short. It is early September. I will leave here for good just before Thanksgiving. Tonight, I have rented an old barge and a bargeman for us alone. Earlier that afternoon, I scoured Beijing for every treat I could find. I bought French bread and salami from the Jianguo Hotel. At the Friendship Store, I grabbed some big tubs of the four-dollar caviar that the Russians love. I liberated some cornichons and olives from my shipped-in stash.

  The boatman putt-putts into the center of the lake and cuts the engine. The sun is setting. We are in a Chinese painting. The light fog tickles the arched bridges over the footpaths. I have a shawl, but I am still chilly. Terence throws his tuxedo jacket over my shoulders. I ha
ve borrowed a tape player from a neighbor; “Tennessee Waltz” and “Unchained Melody” are playing in the background. We drink Great Wall white wine, a new Chinese variety that tastes something like a cross between Riesling and Kool-Aid. We dance on the barge’s flat deck.

  As darkness falls and the stars come out, I am thinking: This will be a pleasant last memory for us both. Thank God I am leaving before he drives me completely insane.

  2

  Later I wonder: Should we have seen it coming? Perhaps we should have seen that it was in his genes all along. But when the death of his mother from cancer brings Terence and me back together again in Florida on Thursday, March 13, 1986, he and I are both very much alive and glad to be so. We are not thinking of our own mortality.

  We are flying.

  The Cessna skirts the Florida coast then banks, turns, and heads back to the landing strip. Terence is at the controls, an instructor beside him. I am in the back. He gently guides the plane down, lets the tires barely touch the ground, and accelerates back up into the air. Over and over he does that. Bank, turn, touch, rise. I look out over the ocean, nearly still, the waves marked only by thin white ripples.

  It is March 1986. Back home in New York, where I now live, it is still winter, the sky muddy and gray. Here in Florida it is a glorious sapphire spring, verging on summer already, warm and clear.

  The instructor hands Terence a helmet. He straps it on and he can no longer see the sky, the sea, or the narrow swath of ground where he is to land, only the controls. Now he is flying blind.

  It has been more than four months since we last saw each other in Beijing. My Thanksgiving 1985 departure from China did not end our relationship as I expected, and perhaps even had half hoped. I moved to New York, still with The Wall Street Journal. He stayed on in Beijing, a year more to fulfill on his contract. Yet even 6,800 miles, life on the opposite sides of day and night, five-dollar-a-minute phone charges, and our still-constant fighting don’t succeed in prying us apart. We spend hundreds of dollars on calls. We talk. We fight. We make up. When I leave my Manhattan studio, even for a short errand, I am always in agony lest he call while I am gone. I finally buy myself some psychic freedom in the form of an answering machine. When I see the red blinking light and hear the operator’s nasal Chinese, “Mei you ren jie”—No one is answering—at least I know he is reaching out.