Peter is at work, it’s morning in New York. I can’t go home for another six months. I close my eyes and try a relaxation exercise (my thoughts skittering like dry leaves.) First, visualize a calm quiet place. But the place I imagine is the night landscape of Borden Station. The long inhumanly white sweep to Lancaster Sound, a black line of open water, and then the deep sky paling slightly at the horizon.
Go to bed. I leave my cup of coffee and crawl into bed behind the white gauzy curtains. It is a bed big enough for two. I leave the lights on, instruct the system to turn them off when I go to sleep and turn them on again if I wake up. I lie there awhile, listening to my heart pound, which makes me nervous, which means that my heartrate doesn’t slow (charming little feedback loop) until finally I guess I wear myself out, and eventually, the fear subsides. I close my eyes and painstakingly imagine Peter’s living room, his couch. I remember where everything is in relationship to me sleeping on his couch. I am sleeping on his couch. I am thinking about Peter and Engineer Xi. It is morning, and time to put on my red and black and go to work.
I feel normal, a bit tired but in the morning the room is only wearing in it’s insistence that I am not back home. I take my latest scribble to Woo Eubong.
She spreads it out on her desk. “It’s interesting,” she says. “What is it?”
“It’s 47 seconds in the system,” I say.
“Well, that’s something. It’s a little like calligraphy,” she says.
“Tutorial art,” I suggest.
“A little flat,” she says. “Too western. Maybe that’s the problem, a western mindset.”
I do not know if she is joking or not. “Right,” I say.
I review jobs, but I am slow because I keep losing concentration. I keep thinking about Chinese calligraphy. Calligraphy emphasizes line, the variation of width and blackness in the stroke, flow. There’s a lot of talk about the rhythm of the character. For example, when I write the English word ‘talk’ I don’t cross the ‘t’ until I finish the ‘k’. A character is supposed to be a kind of circular movement. I tend, when I finish the ‘k’ in talk to drag my pen so there’s a faint line from the ‘k’ to the crossbar of the ‘t’. In calligraphy the faint line is supposed to be implied. It can actually be there, a brush of ink, but whether it is or isn’t, there must be a sense of the artist’s brush moving in that connected, circular pattern.
I keep thinking about all of this when I am supposed to be checking jobs. Thinking about how calligraphy might be connected with imagining buildings.
Frankly, I don’t see any connection at all.
On my fourth Saturday in Wuxi, I go to dinner at Woo Eubong’s flat. It’s a pretty place, less perfect than the apartment I’m staying in, but more like a home. Woo Eubong has two daughters-official policy is one child, but it’s not really so difficult to get permission for a second.
I have spent a few hours in Wuxi, shopping, and finally paid a small fortune for a Wuxi teapot. Made of brown clay, the spout and handle are very realistic looking branches. Mine was made in the second half of the twentieth century, the really valuable ones were made before the Liberation, in feudal China. But it’s still an antique. It’s tiny and comes with four cups that look as if they actually only hold about a quarter of a cup each. The shopkeeper explains that the teapots used to be stuffed with leaves and the tea brewed was very strong. The four little cups sat in a tray and were filled by being splashed first with tea and then with hot water. The tea, he says, never had a chance to get cold. He wraps them, folding the paper so that he doesn’t have to use any adhesive.
It’s tiny, if she doesn’t like it, at least I made the gesture. And she can put it in a drawer, I’ll never know.
I take the bus to the complex where she lives, way out on the edge of town. The buildings are three and four stories tall, and give the impression of careless irregularity, of flow. Tiled roofs jut, balconies look out, roofs are finished as gardens with round moon gates. I look with a more practiced eye. This building was designed by an organic engineer or architect. Woo Eubong?
The gate checks me, opens and I follow my directions back three buildings and then left to the second walkway. There is an archway, as the directions promise, and next to the archway, a child’s three wheel gleams as red as the roof tiles.
I climb a ramp, there is a lift, and ask for the second floor. It is so clean, so polished. They must pay to keep it so clean. Woo Eubong’s door is blue and before I knock it is opened by a child-maybe four years old? She is sucking on a purple ice lolly and does not speak, only looks up at me.
“Hello,” I say.
She regards me seriously and then runs back into the flat, leaving me at the door. She is wearing blue coveralls and yellow shoes.
An older girl with long pigtails peers around the corner. “Mama!” she hollers, “he’s here!” She smiles at me, showing missing teeth, and disappears.
A man comes around the corner, tall and fair-skinned. “Engineer Zhang?” he says, “I’m Zhang Chunqing, Eubong’s husband. Come in.”
The flat smells of food cooking, and from somewhere I hear Woo Eubong saying, “I know he’s here, I’ll be right out. Go talk to him.”
Zhang Chunqing calls, “Girls? Come out here?” He takes my jacket, the girls skid around the corner on the hardwood floor like puppies. “These two worthless daughters are Xiu-ping and Xiu-lin.”
The girls giggle madly and take back off for the kitchen.
He sighs, “You will find we are not a very formal household, I’m afraid.”
I find it is very hard not to feel at home here. Woo Eubong comes in bringing finger dumplings and sliced vegetables and Zhang Chunqing gets beer. The girls want to watch the vid and are told they can’t do it in the front room. They disappear into their bedroom but reappear every fifteen minutes or so to get some snacks and regard me owlishly before breaking into giggles and dashing off to the bedroom. Zhang Chunqing tells me that the older girl, Xiu-ping, is going to a special school where she learns piano and Japanese and we fall into a discussion of the best way to learn a language. Woo Eubong quizzes me on how I learned Mandarin. Chunqing is a biology teacher at a middle school for students who are preparing for University work.
The room is pretty, but there is a pair of small red shoes by the doors that lead to the balcony. A stack of papers sits on one end of a shelf that displays pottery (perhaps my teapot was a good choice.) It is not as beautiful as my apartment, but it is more comfortable. And the beer works on me and I begin to relax a little. It is hard to completely relax, I am always watching my behavior, trying to be Chinese. There is a huaqiao saying that when you step foot in China you become Chinese. Maybe it is true if you are first generation, maybe it would be true for San Xiang’s child, Foreman Qian’s grandchild, but it is not true for me. Maybe I am more my mother’s son than I ever knew.
But I like Woo Eubong a great deal and her husband is easy to talk to. Dinner is delightful, thousand year old eggs, sweet and sour pork and spiced cabbage with anise, a chicken roasted with it’s head tucked under it’s wing, fresh sliced tomatoes with a dusting of white sugar, candied yams. The girls have to be told to pick up their rice bowls when they eat, they want to leave the bowls on the table, stick chopsticks in them and carefully try to get the rice in their mouth with spilling anything. Woo Eubong is a little embarrassed, but I am relieved to be treated to real life. Everything at Wuxi has seemed to consist of glossy surfaces, effortless perfection, with me as the only flawed example of the other life I knew. It is nice to see that children are still children.
After dinner we talk some more, and I find myself admitting that I am frustrated.
“You try too hard,” Woo Eubong says. “You have this feeling that what you are trying to do is very difficult, but it isn’t. Once you find a way in, it will not be difficult at all.”
A way in. A way in where?
Monday at Wuxi Engineering Technologies. I spend the morning reviewing jobs. I am starting to pick up
speed, this, my third week. I eat lunch with Woo Eubong in the cadres’ dining room (five pink prawns on the side of my plate like five shingles, slices of green kiwi fruit from Australia, cooked cucumber and tomato.)
“Today,” she says, “you’re not going to scribble. Today you are going to design doors.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“I am trying something different.”
Ah. Okay. So that afternoon I sit and design doors. Imagine a door, the system draws it. A wooden door. A metal door. A garage door. A great Chinese double gate, each side set with eighty-one brass studs. A moon gate, the opening a round zero. Then back to wooden doors. Without windows, with insets, with carving, with a window, with square panes, with panes like a fan. I take a stack to Woo Eubong. She nods.
“Keep working,” she says.
“Doors?” I say.
“Doors,” she says.
So I do doors with transoms. Doors with security systems. Doors that fold, that retract, that slide. Doors within doors. When I run out I do doors of varying widths. Doors of varying finishes. A stone door. I start to indicate a little bit of entryway but Woo Eubong, leaning over my shoulder says, “No, just the doors.”
Glass doors. Stained glass doors. Revolving doors. Doors for openings with arches, with triangles. Doors in doorways with lintels. I rack my brains for variations of doors. I do doors that open up. Doors that swing, slated doors, bamboo doors, half doors. My desk is covered in doors. People passing stop and look, shake their heads. By four-thirty I think I have done every kind of door known to man. But Woo Eubong keeps me making doors until 5:00.
I walk back to my apartment, noticing the doors I pass.
There are a lot that I hadn’t thought of. Hell, when I get back to the apartment I find that I hadn’t even done my closet door. So that night, I do a few more doors, and when I pull out my schematic of Wuxi Complex, I run through all the doors in the place.
Li Jian-fen was incredible with doors.
I begin to realize the importance of doors. They set the tone for the building, they are the second interaction between building and person, the first being the sight of the building. I think about the black doors of the main entrance to Wuxi Complex. They are opaque, lusterless matte. It is not just the efficiency of energy absorption, it is also the effect they have when one enters. They are like walls, they protect.
China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a wall. And so doors are very important because they represent vulnerability but also opportunity, which is a great metaphor for every endeavor.
Excited, the next morning I am ready to tell Woo Eubong all about my understanding of doors. I see why she has had me study doors. But she is planning and I don’t get a chance to talk with her. She has a luncheon so I eat lunch with a couple of people in the department and when I get back from lunch there is a message from her in the system.
Do floors.
And so I do floors. And the next day steps (a long, difficult afternoon.) Thursday I do windows, which is a pleasure after steps. And Friday I do lighting. Saturday, usually my half-day, there is a message in the system for me. More lighting. Monday, more lighting. Tuesday, oh bliss, I do sinks.
I learn to dread the afternoons again. There’s no more failure, no more 27 second scribbles, but it’s so tedious. Still, I find myself looking at lighting, at sinks, at stairs. The Wuxi Complex isn’t enough, I use the schematics from the organic architects and observe what they did with doors, with windows, with stairs. I never really thought much about landings or mezzanines. Li Jian-fen used a lot of mezzanine areas at Wuxi complex, but her use of stairs isn’t particularly inventive.
Still, by three-thirty, there I sit at my desk, haunted, trying to invent another sink and hoping that Woo Eubong won’t come by and see me sitting there not doing anything. She never says anything, but she notices.
I do walls and ceilings. I have learned a lot by the time I do walls and ceilings, I have more ideas. But I do them faster and then there I sit. It is work a child could do. It is meaningless, a catalogue. Has she decided I cannot do the real engineering? Except for the one assignment in lighting, after three more weeks I haven’t done anything even remotely resembling engineering. I wonder, does Woo Eubong keep count of the number I do? Does the system report the amount of time I sit motionless?
One Saturday night I sit down again and try to scribble. Four walls, light through ice, and then I think, what kind of windows? I remember doing all those windows and try to remember if there were any that I liked and-
16 seconds. Worse than when I first started.
After that I don’t try again.
When I have been there nine weeks, Woo Eubong comes to me one day and tells me that I am needed on a project. They are building a complex (in the conventional way, no daoist engineering this time) and are involved in a competitive bid. So for four days I work with other engineers doing real engineering work. We discuss ideas, have the system construct analogs, modify and change them. By the time I join the team, they have already been working for over a week, and on Saturday night, at nine, we submit our rough plan for the competitive bid and then go into Wuxi and have a drink.
I feel as if I am one of these people, I have been working with them ten to twelve hours a day for four days and they accept me as a colleague. I realize, sipping my beer, that I am a colleague. I am an engineer. When I go back to New York, no matter what else, I will be an engineer, I will have my degree in Construction Engineering from Nanjing University, and I will be something of an expert in the use of systems. Not to mention particularly inventive with doors.
It is a comfort. Almost enough to make me forget the last 16 second scribble.
After the project I settle into days of reviewing jobs and creating variations on whatever themes Woo Eubong assigns me. Ten weeks, eleven weeks. The Wuxi Complex begins to matter less and less to me. It is late May. I will by in New York on July 1.
I pick out my final project. I must do a final project for Nanjing University based on my co-op experience. I chose to expand on the systems work I did with the project team. It is interesting, mildly diverting. But it is hard to care. My credit balance is blooming, my apartment is beautiful, but all I want to do is go home. I will eat fried chicken and biscuits, pasta smothered in cheese (cheese is not eaten very much in China.) Peter has promised to make me lasagna my first week home. Rice and beans my second week home, although I make better rice and beans than Peter.
Woo Eubong shows me the specs for her projects. A housing complex, an office building. A beach house.
A beach house sounds nice. I ask her about it. It will be on the island of Hainandao. Hainandao was one of the original special economic zones like Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Taiwan. It is still a freemarket zone, a place of virulent capitalism, mean to fuel the socialist system. The beach house is for one of the old mercantile families of Hainandao, built by the clan corporation.
She points out the setting. No specs, she says. “The only reason they didn’t give it to an architect is that Comrade Gao, the big man of Wuxi Engineering, is friends with Comrade Wang. Comrade Gao wants a number of designs. Engineer Li Jian-fen is submitting one.”
“And you,” I say.
She looks down.
“Humble administrators build gardens, too,” I say, referring to the Zhuozheng, the Humble Administrator’s garden, one of the famous gardens of Suzhou.
She glances up at me but doesn’t answer and I wonder if I’ve offended her.
“You should try,” she says.
“I can’t compete with organic engineering,” I say.
“Okay, then see what you can do with heating and cooling,” she says. It is an infuriating answer. Why did she suggest that I try?
Does she feel that I might be able to create an adequate building? She doesn’t ever much comment on how I fulfill her assignments, I never know if I’ve met with her approval
or not.
I fiddle with heating and cooling systems. Convection. Conduction. Old fashioned systems. Expensive systems. Efficient systems. This is a big area, I suspect I will do heating and cooling systems for awhile.
Hainandao. The name means South Sea Island. The first character, ‘hai’ means ‘sea’. It is the same as the ‘hai’ in Haibao. Sea-wave. I think about heating and cooling systems. (On Hainandao they would only need a cooling system. There’s a lot of sunlight.) I try to imagine a beach house in Hainandao, lots of wood. Maybe paper screens, like they use in Japan.
I scribble more heating and cooling systems. And eventually I stop thinking about Hainandao. And I do not think about Haibao’s white clothes folded neatly by the shattered starburst of the window.
That evening I spend a long time making dinner, trying to concoct rice and beans from the local ingredients. The result is pretty close, although not what my mother would make. Not even what I would make under normal circumstances. I leave it on cycle; flash, stand, flash, stand. My mother cooks on a stove, but I have only a flash wok and an oven, it is hard to slow cook something.
Then while it is cooking I sit down and tap the system. I am not going to scribble anything, I just want to try to imagine a beach house. And so I try. I try to imagine something that looks as insubstantial as paper, maybe sliding walls.
23 seconds.
Disgusted I get up and go back to the beans and rice. But there’s nothing to do but wait. I try the beach house again.
28 seconds.
Back to the rice and beans. And then again, the beach house.
19 seconds.
Woo Eubong taps in for twenty, thirty minutes at a time. She sits at the desk for three hours, working, answering questions, dropping back into her work. I have even tried to mimic her posture. I am so frustrated I could hit something. I force myself into the chair and decide I will keep doing it until I manage. I imagine the beach house.
China Mountain Zhang Page 23
