Big in China Page 10
I would never hold myself up as a representative of anything, much less my entire country, so I just pushed this out of my mind. What really excited me was how much my experiences resonated with expats and former expats all over, including those living and working in America. I thought I was writing about my China experiences, but I began to appreciate that I was actually documenting what it felt like to live in a different culture.
At the time we lived in China, there were estimated to be over six million Americans living abroad, and 315,000 in China alone, yet most people in the United States didn’t seem to know we existed. I was proud to help normalize this experience, which had been so thoroughly expansive for my entire family, and excited that my readership was growing, but I still had ambivalence about being a public person.
The disadvantage of people noticing me became clear one brutal Monday morning. It began awfully, as we couldn’t rouse any of the kids after another weekend when we pushed everything a tad too hard. It felt like a black cloud had settled on the house, with everyone waking up grumpy and unhappy. Jacob was in a particularly foul mood, which didn’t lighten as we biked to school together.
Walking into the school lobby, we passed Wyatt Cameron, a teacher and good family friend.
“Hi, Jacob!” he said cheerfully, as my son blew by with a grunt.
“What’s wrong with him?” Wyatt asked. “Did he wipe out on the way over here?”
“No,” I said. “He’s just acting the fool.”
Jacob looked at me with fury in his eyes, muttered something about embarrassing him, and stomped away. As I trailed after him, I saw someone walking quickly toward me. It was the guy from the pool.
“Hi, Alan,” he said, with an extended hand. There was a smiling woman by his side.
“This is my wife. She also loves your column.”
I shook hands and said hello to both. As much as I appreciated their support, I needed to focus on Jacob, who was still a couple of steps ahead of me. “It’s really nice to meet you,” I said, “but I’m sorry, I just can’t talk right now. My son is having a rough morning.”
“Yeah,” Jacob barked, turning his head over his shoulder. “Because of you!”
We walked into the bathroom together and I told him to take a deep breath.
“I don’t know what’s bugging you,” I said. “But you need to calm down and get to class.”
Jacob has always had an amazing knack for pulling himself together for school, no matter what was going on and he did it again, apologizing sheepishly and giving me a little hug before heading to class. I turned to the sink to splash water on my face. At 8:00 a.m., it had already been a long day. I looked into the mirror and didn’t like what I saw.
With no time to put my contact lenses on, I was wearing my chunky black-framed glasses, along with old yoga pants and a threadbare Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt. My hair was sticking up at odd angles and I badly needed a shave. I was stressed out and badly undercaffeinated, and it showed all over my face. I wondered if seeing me like this, and in conflict with my son, would alter my readers’ impressions. Then I was shocked to even ponder such a thing.
Did it matter if readers saw my underbelly? Did I have to start contemplating my appearance every time I left the house, or try to put a happy face on anything I was going through? I would never do that. The column’s success stemmed from being willing to be honest and cut close to the bone. I wasn’t going to change a thing.
Chapter 16
Into the Mystic
Language misunderstandings were part of my life in China from the day I arrived until the day I left. The more I attempted to get out and really speak Chinese, the more I opened myself to screwing things up. Usually, these mishaps just led to annoyances or minor mistakes, like taking a roundabout cab ride or ordering the wrong dishes in a restaurant.
Sometimes, however, the foul-ups were downright hilarious, as when I tried to purchase edamame at a local market. It began with a comment by Theo Yardley, who walked in for a visit one day when I was cooking frozen edamame for my kids. She saw what I was doing and advised me that fresh soybeans were readily available at local markets. They were called mao dou, or hairy beans, she said, referring to the soft fuzz that covers them.
A few days later I was buying fruits and vegetables in the large warehouse behind the Kite Market when I remembered this conversation. Unable to remember the name, I called Theo. When she did not answer her phone, I stretched my brain as far as I could and remembered that mao meant hair, but I could not recall how to say bean. Suddenly, the word popped into my head—bi (pronounced “be”).
I approached the young woman at the stand where I had just purchased cilantro, carrots, and celery, smiled, and said, “Ni hao. Ni yo mao bi ma?” (“Hello. Do you have any edamame?” Or so I thought.) She grinned oddly and shook her head no, so I moved along, going to a series of stands and asking the same thing, always with the same result.
After five or six such requests, I was about to give up when Theo returned my call.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing. I was wondering how you say edamame, but I remembered it was mao bi,” I said proudly.
There was a silence followed by a short, sharp guffaw. “Did you ask for that?”
“Yes,” I said. “But no one seems to have it.”
My friend burst out laughing and it took her thirty seconds to regain her composure enough to speak. “Oh, Alan,” she said. “I think you should head home now. You made a big mistake. It’s, uh . . .”
Theo was having a hard time spitting out the nature of my blunder. My mind raced trying to figure out what I had said, and I felt the blood drain from my face as I remembered where I had heard the word bi—it was a central part of an X-rated cheer that Chinese crowds liked to chant in national team competitions against Japan. It was a vulgar term for the female genitalia. I had been asking a series of young women if they had any hairy vaginas.
Obviously, I had a lot to learn, and I probably should have increased my Chinese course load, but I could not bring myself to do so. After Tom left, I found the classes to be melancholy reminders of the circumstances surrounding his absence. Even as I tried to get over that, I simply got busier and found myself studying less and less, even though I was falling ever more in love with China and wanted to speak to everyone about everything.
I soon dropped learning characters to focus on the oral language. You simply cannot master written Chinese without hours of serious studying, and I was not properly committed to doing so; there were too many other things I wanted to do.
My teacher Yechen was disappointed, and he told me that his professor in London had given him one staunch piece of advice about teaching Chinese privately: do not take any students who refuse to learn characters because it indicated a lack of seriousness. Still, we continued, and my language skills progressed steadily. As much as anything, I just liked spending time with Yechen, gaining insight into his view of China’s history and its contemporary potential and problems.
He believed that modern China was lost, raising a generation of people cut off from their long, proud history. Chinese society was based on the principles espoused in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, he said, and too few people now understood what that meant and were caught up in an endless quest for material things.
Yechen was thoroughly grounded in classical Chinese philosophy, culture, and religion. He spoke in aphorisms without pretension, animated his conversation with references to ancient parables, guided his decision making by looking to historical precedence, and was obviously out of step with contemporary Beijing’s go-go aesthetic. But he was also full of contradictory impulses, an Anglophile from his time in London who had cultured taste in music and literature, both Western (Tennessee Williams) and Chinese (the intellectual Gao Xingjian)—and displayed a simple but distinct sartorial flair. As someone who has alw
ays enjoyed big, eccentric personalities, I found all this entirely endearing.
Yechen only had a couple of other students, preferring to focus on reading and writing. He had dozens of composition books filled with his journals, rows and rows of meticulous calligraphy characters. Though I could not read them, I believed that they were likely filled with brilliant insights, and I hoped that he managed to achieve his dream of turning them into a book.
Chinese people seemed to have a harder time relating to Yechen. When he came to my house, Yechen often spoke with our two ayis, sometimes at length. They respected him as a laoshi, or teacher, and seemed to enjoy chatting with him, but they both thought he was strange. He was clearly very bright, Hou Ayi told me, so why didn’t he have a better job or higher ambitions?
During my second year studying with Yechen, we started visiting some of his favorite places around Beijing together. One day we visited a small Buddhist temple and the White Cloud Temple (Baiyunguan), Beijing’s most revered Taoist site, where a monk friend of his lived and studied. Yechen had already given me a couple of books about Buddhism, which he practiced. But he was lately talking more about Taoism as well, and he was beginning to explain the relationship between these two religions to me.
According to Yechen, Buddhism had been a flexible religion, adopting the characters of the dominant religions everywhere it spread from India. So Tibetan Buddhism was mystical, based on the Bon religion that predated it, and Chinese Buddhism was grounded in Taoism, which was firmly established when Buddhism arrived.
“Taoism is the root and Buddhism is the flower,” he explained. “They are part of the same system.”
He met me at a subway stop and we strolled over to the White Cloud Temple, a large, beautiful complex with a quiet, peaceful feel. He told me that it was spared throughout the Cultural Revolution because many of the communist government’s top leaders secretly prayed here, arriving in the middle of the night. This has gone on for decades, he said, and continues today. The Chinese Taoist Association was headquartered here, which protected the site, but also left it vulnerable to government control and corruption. Because the concept of feng shui stems from Taoism, and remains very important to many secular Chinese, who will pay monks high fees to help them properly design their homes, money flows through Taoist temples.
Monk dorm rooms lined the side of the temple in between shrines. Yechen knocked gently on the door of one room, where his friend answered and ushered us into a tiny space. It was just big enough for two beds and two small desks, with a tiny bit of floor space in between.
The friend, Wang, was wearing the normal Taoist monk outfit, with his long hair tied in a bun atop his head underneath a small brown cap, almost like an old-fashioned nurse’s hat, and a brown robe wrapped around him. He turned on a water kettle and carefully, gently filled a small teapot with leaves. As we waited for the water to boil, I looked around and noticed the beautiful Chinese calligraphy hanging above the desk. Yechen explained that his friend had done all of them. He urged me to speak Chinese, and I did my best to engage in conversation with the quiet Wang.
The tea was delicious, rich and multilayered, and we drank countless tiny cups before rising, saying our thanks, and heading out for a detailed tour of the grounds. Yechen whispered conspiratorially about government plots making a lot of money off the temple—“fake monks” who profiteered on the backs of the true believers. I feared that he might be a little nuts and conspiracy minded until, on the way out, we saw a Taoist monk exit the temple and climb into the driver’s seat of a black Audi. I looked over at Yechen, and he raised his eyebrows. “See?” he whispered. “Many, many fake monks here.”
After a vegetarian lunch at a nearby restaurant—“we can’t go into these temples with meat on our breath,” he said—we turned down a winding road that led into a hutong. These narrow, old alleyway streets used to cover central Beijing but were now being torn down at a remarkable and depressing pace. Most of them were too narrow to accept more than a trickle of motorized traffic, making them islands of calm; they were almost always replaced with towering glass skyscrapers and traffic-clogged, multilane roads.
We passed by many little bakeries making baozi, the big soft dough balls that are a popular Beijing street food. We were followed by a pack of omnipresent hutong dogs, the amazing little mutts who roam all over Beijing’s old neighborhoods. I looked up on the roof and saw a series of cats also running along with us. Toddlers bundled up for winter peered out from behind their parents’ large baozi delivery bikes. I felt a million miles away from everything, but closely observed.
We passed a large recycling station, which you see all over Beijing, tucked into the city’s poorer, more remote corners. People ride large flat-backed three-wheeled bikes all around to pick up recyclable material—cardboard, glass, tin, aluminum, and plastic, often including giant cooking oil bottles tied together and rattling around. Their bikes often look ready to topple over. Migrant workers at these little centers buy and sort the goods, which they then sell themselves. It looked like the family running this center slept there, under a plastic tarp set up as a makeshift home.
Chinese New Year was just days away and the city was buzzing. Little stands selling boxes of fruit to give as presents were everywhere, along with fireworks stands. On New Year’s Eve, there would be an orgy of explosions.
Chinese New Year is the most important holiday. It is like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July wrapped up into one. Everyone who possibly can returns to his or her hometown, causing the largest annual migration of people in the world, with hundreds of millions of people crisscrossing China. Throughout the city, the energy of so many people moving with purpose was palpable, but in this hutong, life was ticking at its normal pace.
“Look around,” Yechen said. “These are the people too poor to travel home.”
He himself would not be returning to his hometown of Wuxi, near Shanghai, though he often spoke of his mother.
At the entrance to the Buddhist temple, a little old man sat inside a ticket booth. I looked over his shoulder and laughed, seeing that the walls were plastered with Slam posters of dunking NBA stars like Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James
“Do you like basketball?” I asked in Chinese.
“Oh yes, very much,” he said.
“I work for that magazine,” I said, pointing. He smiled and waved me in, which surprised me and impressed Yechen. This was the second time Slam had greased the wheels for me in Beijing.
Yechen showed me around the temple, taking me into shrines and teaching me the proper way to light incense and place it in the giant burners, and how to pray before a golden Buddha. This graven idol worship stirred no guilt in my Jewish soul. I just tried to follow Yechen and imagine what he was feeling inside.
Three weeks later, Yechen asked me if I wanted to accompany him and his monk friend Wang on a pilgrimage to Huashan, one of Taoism’s five holy mountains, located near Xi’an in central China. Many people consider it the heart and soul of the Taoist religion. It sounded like an unforgettable journey, but my family already had plans, so Yechen went with another of his students, returning deeply moved.
He told me all about the harrowing hike up to Huashan’s five peaks and showed me photos of single-plank walkways along sheer cliffs suspended by chains above steep drops. The peaks were shrouded in mist and dotted with small stone temples and stunted evergreens. His enthusiasm made perfect sense.
About a month later, Yechen sat down for a lesson and told me he would be leaving Beijing. He had a great job offer from another London university, with a high salary and free lodging in a storied Victorian mansion. He often spoke longingly about his time in London, so I thought this was great news, but when I congratulated him, he said he wasn’t sure he would accept the position. He had been profoundly moved by that trip to Huashan and was giving serious thought to becoming a monk instead.
When he asked my opinion, I told him rather tepidly that he should go to London. I thought being a monk sounded like a wild gambit, but I hesitated to really share my feelings because I didn’t want to insult him.
I thought about Yechen constantly over the five days before our next class. The more I did, the crazier becoming a monk seemed and the more inadequate I considered my milquetoast response. He was obviously unhappy and looking for a change. But renouncing the material world was too radical. Going to London might well turn things around, and if not, he could always return to China and enter the monkhood. If he chose that route first, however, it would be much harder to change course. I developed a coherent argument and was prepared to have a good talk.
When Yechen returned to my house, he promptly announced that he had rejected the London offer and would soon be searching for a monastery. I wanted to try to talk him out of this until he told me that over the weekend he had visited the White Cloud Temple and ceremoniously burned all those meticulous diaries. A chill ran through me as he said that he had come to see the journals as totems of youthful naïveté, markers of a past he was leaving behind.
“I thought I would feel sadness and fear when I burned them,” he said. “But I felt a great sense of release and peace.”
I hoped that the feeling would continue, but I was concerned. He said that he would travel with one small bag, going from place to place until he found a place that suited him. All of his friends thought him crazy, he said. I did not consider Yechen insane, but his vision of monkhood seemed awfully romantic, like a mythical American kid talking about setting out with his baseball glove and bat until he found some nirvana where he could play ball round the clock. I was shaken that he hadn’t decided whether to be a Buddhist or Taoist monk, which seemed to cry out that he was seeking escape more than true spiritual enlightenment.