Big in China Read online

  We took over a nearby gazebo and invited our new friends to join us when our food arrived. Jacob, a veritable vegetarian, was so hungry and having so much fun with his new friends that he tried marinated, grilled beef. He tentatively stuck a corner in his mouth and nibbled, as Becky and I watched intently while pretending to have no interest.

  “Mmmm. This is great.”

  He gobbled down the piece and asked for another. He ate a whole order and has been a steak-loving carnivore ever since.

  We all grilled and ate together, then the men sat in the gazebo drinking beer while the women walked down to the riverbank and oversaw the children. Becky would normally have given me a hard time about this unfair division of labor, but we were both too enchanted to want to change a thing. The kids scampered around, catching crabs, throwing rocks into the raging brown river, and playing tag.

  Huang Duan, finally realizing we were happy and that he wasn’t doing a bad job, joined us, eating, drinking, and serving as our translator. We lingered for hours, as I downed one tiny plastic cup of lukewarm beer after another after endless toasts of “gan-bei” (bottoms up). As we started to say our good-byes, four of the older village girls, all about twelve years old, swept in to take our bottles. They carefully poured the remnants of each into a two-liter soda bottle, no doubt for their parents’ enjoyment, and gathered up the empties, which each had a deposit worth about a dime.

  We finally said our good-byes and began slowly walking through the light mud back to our van. “Thank you, Dad,” Jacob said, giving me a big hug. “This was the best lunch ever.”

  Chapter 9

  Sad and Deep as You

  I was washing my hands early one morning when my cell phone began chirping in my pocket. Stumbling to yank it out with still-dripping hands, I fumbled and watched it skitter across the tile floor. I reached over and grabbed it, answering in a rush.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Alan. It’s Dad.”

  “Hi. How are you doing?”

  “Ah, not so good. I have a little bladder C-A.”

  “A little what?”

  “Bladder C-A. Bladder cancer. Same thing that got Doc Meyers.”

  Doc was a dear family friend who passed away a decade earlier. My father, too, is an old-school physician, a retired pediatrician, and it didn’t surprise me to hear him speak about his own diagnosis with clinical matter-of-factness. It was the diagnosis itself that left me speechless.

  “I know this is hard on you being so far away, but don’t let it be,” he said. “I’m fine. I’ll have a little surgery, take the tumor out, biopsy it, and see what’s what. Don’t worry about it.”

  I tried to digest this mixed message: “Don’t worry about it.” “It’s just a little bladder C-A.” “Same thing that got Doc Meyers.”

  I worried.

  The only good thing about this crisis is that it transformed a hard decision into a no-brainer. We had been debating the wisdom of returning in a few months for a December visit. Rebecca wanted to go but I thought we should explore some of Asia instead. Things were going so well, I reasoned, that we shouldn’t risk taking the kids back just four months after moving to Beijing, possibly making them homesick. But now there was no doubt; we would be returning to the United States for the holidays.

  Two days after that phone call, my dad had his “little surgery” to remove the tumor. The operation occurred in the middle of the night China time. I called my brother as soon as I woke up and learned that Dad had recovered, only to have some complications and have to go back under the knife. I went off to coach Jacob’s soccer team, waiting anxiously for another call, which came midgame as I was sprinting up and down the pitch, simultaneously coaching and refereeing.

  I took the call, pulled over to the sideline, and waved my hand around, vaguely hoping someone else would take over. The news was good. Dad was awake, responsive, and feeling fine. By the end of the week they would know whether the tumor had metastasized into the bladder, necessitating further surgery, or out of the bladder, meaning there was effectively no treatment to be had.

  Three days later, I escorted my visiting in-laws to the Summer Palace, a massive park of gardens, royal residences, and lakes. We were walking down the Long Corridor, where the empress once strolled, when my dad called. I ducked away and strolled aimlessly, hearing a pinch in my own voice as I explained where I was. I barely heard him describing an upcoming gig for the Dixieland band that had earned him the nickname Dixie Doc. We both knew he wasn’t calling to chat, and I was certain that this delay in getting to the point was not a good sign.

  He said he had some results. The tumor hadn’t spread beyond the bladder, which was good, but it was in the bladder walls, which was bad. The whole organ would have to be removed. I asked logical questions about treatment options and likely outcomes, and he remained calm and clinical, as if we were talking about someone else. I barely heard the answers.

  I leaned against a railing, looking out over Kunming Lake and the famous bridge that bisects it. Thousands of Chinese tourists moved behind me, massive lines following umbrella-wielding tour guides. My in-laws were back there somewhere, but I had lost interest in the place.

  The last thing I remember Dixie saying was, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Don’t let it ruin your time over there.”

  I silently rejoined my small group, walking through the grounds with my mind half a world away. I felt like a fool, numbly strolling along as our tour guide chattered away, but I didn’t want to pull the plug on my visitors’ day and I was not ready to discuss this quite yet. Hal and Ruth asked if everything was okay and I muttered, “Yes.”

  After lunch in a beautiful restaurant and a visit to the Fragrant Hills, a hillside teeming with Chinese tourists viewing the famous “red leaves” of fall, I finally told my in-laws the truth. We were speeding home in the backseat of a car driven by Mrs. Lu, one-half of a husband/wife team of drivers we had recently found. She was weaving in and out of traffic on the Fifth Ring Road, one of the broad highways that surround the city, making all of us cringe until my news caused everyone to lose track of the outside world.

  A short, stunned silence set in before Hal, who is also a physician, began asking thorough medical questions, which I answered as best as I could.

  “Your dad’s a strong man,” he finally said. “He can overcome this.”

  We both knew he was right about point one and just hoping about point two. My father had been ridiculously healthy and fit for most of his life, running six miles five days a week for decades. In the five years since he retired, however, he had his hip replaced, a cancerous prostate removed, and major back surgery. He had survived each of these operations remarkably well and still looked ten years younger than he was, with a full head of brown hair. Now his body would have to overcome one more indignity.

  Over the next few days I was more deeply affected than I anticipated. Morbid thoughts ran through my head. Though the prognosis was pretty good, I couldn’t stop pondering the worst-case scenario: that my father was dying. Pessimism, grief—even panic—flooded me, no matter how much I tried to remain rational. Among other concerns, I wondered what this would mean for our China venture. Could we stay if things didn’t go well? Would we want to?

  The romanticism of being on the other side of the world vanished in an instant. All the possibilities it opened up paled in comparison to the pain of being so far away during what could turn into a protracted illness. I also felt a spreading fear that he might not make it. It was hard to contemplate returning to American life without my father.

  After just two months, it was obvious that he had been right when he said we couldn’t say no to Beijing. I already sensed that this decision would indeed mark a turning point in our lives. Now, his illness had thrown me off stride. A couple of weeks later, he turned seventy and I felt our distance keenly, posting a tribute on my blog that had the melo
dramatic tone of a eulogy. I wrote:

  My father Richard Paul, aka Dixie Doc, turns 70 today. Roasting Dixie is like shooting fish in a barrel. The hardest part is deciding where to start.

  It could be with him stripping down in the parking lot of a Florida diner packed with senior citizens enjoying early bird dinner to sprint naked into the Gulf of Mexico. Or promoting his newly released CD while on the witness stand in a highly charged suit against Blue Cross. Or playing a show 24 hours after leaving the hospital following a major operation. That was the same surgery where he used a marker to write on his stomach before going under: “No interns. No medical students. No Foley catheter.”

  Happy Birthday, Dixie. Please remember that George Bernard Shaw was right when he said, “A man of great common sense and good taste—meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.” And he was wrong when he said, “Hell is full of musical amateurs.” Just don’t ask Mom about the latter.

  My fellow Mandarin classmate Tom Davis and I regularly discussed my fears about my father’s health. He was patient, caring, and supportive—everything you would want from a friend. He never shared with me that he had his own familial health concerns; he was growing increasingly worried about his wife, Cathy.

  She was experiencing mysterious and persistent back pain, which I only learned about when Theo Yardley hitched a ride to class and inquired about Cathy’s health. Somehow, she knew about this problem despite rarely speaking to Tom, while I knew nothing despite seeing him several times a week. The ladies of Riviera knew what was going on in one another’s lives.

  “She’s not doing well,” Tom said, “and we can’t figure out what the problem is.”

  I listened intently, feeling terribly self-centered about all the time Tom and I had spent talking about my father.

  A dedicated athlete, Cathy had started having back pain on her regular runs. It didn’t go away after repeated rests, so she visited a doctor at the Western-style, expat-oriented hospital, who diagnosed joint inflammation. But she wasn’t responding to treatment, and they still had not discovered the source of the problem.

  They came over for dinner one night, and the four of us ate while the kids watched a movie together in our den. Eli watched in awe as Sudha removed her legs and scooted around the floor. He ran to my side. “That girl has plastic legs!” he exclaimed.

  I looked at Tom and Cathy, embarrassed. But they were unbothered. “Yes, she does,” Tom said.

  This was only the second or third time I had met Cathy and she seemed fine—but appearances can be deceiving. Over the next few weeks, Tom became more and more preoccupied with Cathy’s health, as she kept feeling worse despite a string of negative test results. Clearly something was being missed, and an increasingly concerned Tom pushed her to return for an American checkup.

  The night she left for Seattle, Tom and his girls came over for pizza. He brought a pair of electric clippers and shaved my head as part of an ongoing show of support for my father, who was about to start his chemo. My blog became a festival of bald-headed photos as a dozen friends and family members were shorn.

  I spent the next day with Tom as he waited for news. We were in the back of his van, heading home, when Cathy called. Watching his face as he offered quiet words of comfort, I braced for bad news, but still gasped when he hung up and told me with a quivering voice that Cathy was riddled with cancer.

  Imaging showed that her lungs were filled with spots; she had a huge tumor on her spine, which had been the source of her original back pain; and there were indications that her cancer had spread throughout her organs. Cathy had advanced small-cell lung cancer, and there was no cure. The illness does, however, respond to aggressive chemotherapy and an earlier diagnosis would have improved her odds of living longer.

  You have to undergo a thorough medical screening as part of receiving a long-term Chinese visa, including a chest x-ray. Cathy had hers while on a look-see visit to China. I had actually been annoyed that we had not known about this option on our own visit because it allowed you to do everything—blood test, EKG, chest x-ray—in one place. We had spent a whole day going to different doctors’ offices to take care of this back home.

  It now seemed clear that nobody had really read Cathy’s x-ray; if they had, the disease would have been detected and Tom and Cathy never would have moved. Once arrived, they were at the mercy of her employer and available medical care. By the time it became obvious that she needed immediate and dramatic help—help in America—it was too late.

  One of the things I liked best about Tom and Cathy was their wholehearted embrace of China and the expat life. While others seemed to seek out things to complain about, from the speed of Internet connections to the cleanliness of public toilets, Tom and Cathy enjoyed every minute of their adventure. It was one of the things that drew us together.

  But having moved to China a couple of months before her illness took hold put Tom in an extra perilous situation, as he was now homeless and jobless while facing the possibility of becoming a far-too-young widower and single father of two. It seemed particularly cruel that the new life that Tom and Cathy had embraced was making a horrible situation worse.

  Tom quickly made plans to return home with the girls, and I kept him company as he packed a few bags. A Christmas tree hung with ornaments Tom and Cathy had picked up over the course of their eighteen-year relationship sat in the corner. The next day, I stopped by again to hug my friend good-bye and give the girls meager gifts of Skittles and coloring books.

  While grieving over Tom’s news and fretting over my father’s health, I received some unexpected good news. I had edited three of my favorite blog posts filled with excitement and fascination about my new life and submitted them to the editor of WSJ.com. I quickly received an e-mail letter of acceptance, with word that the columns would be debuting in just a few weeks.

  The sense of possibility and reinvention I felt from my earliest days writing blog posts about my arrival in China was paying off. But I struggled to make sense of receiving such good news while feeling so much dread for Cathy and my father.

  Days later, I attended Jacob and Eli’s end-of-term holiday show, an ambitious performance held in a giant tent on the soccer pitch behind their school, just outside the Riv’s gates. We walked there on a cold night, feeling the chill, dry Siberian winds whip through us. The smell of coal smoke hung heavy in the air, as it did throughout the Beijing winter.

  Inside the tent, warmed up by an army of towering ceramic heaters, I looked around and was overcome with emotion. I felt a surge of pride for my whole family. This felt like a graduation ceremony for our first semester in China, and we had all passed with flying colors. The new column was gravy, but thinking about my good fortune made me ponder my friends’ predicament and how fast their lives had been turned upside down.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks as I thought about Tom and Cathy. No one noticed in the dark tent, but I grabbed Becky’s hand and squeezed it hard. For all the adventures and experiences we had already had in China, nothing topped the simple, profound joy of watching our kids in an elementary school play. I felt certain that Cathy would never experience this and terribly guilty about thinking about her in the past tense. I had a deep sense of doom.

  A week later, I was sitting in my parents’ den in Pittsburgh, with Rebecca and our kids. My father was half asleep on the couch, struggling to stay awake as my kids watched Dumbo and wrestled on the floor, their pent-up energy the result of too much time spent indoors.

  I accompanied my father, who was a shadow of his normal self, to a chemo session. It was humbling to observe cancer’s equal-opportunity hunger, with patients of every age, color, ethnicity, and income level sitting side by side receiving IV drips.

  My column debuted while we were visiting, and my father told me how proud he was. He had become much more open in talking about his feelings after his first bout with cancer, and now
he was throwing around “I love you’s” like confetti at a parade.

  When it was time to leave, there was no way to squelch the thought that I could be saying good-bye for the last time. Before leaving for the airport, he told me to go into the front closet and find his giant, forty-year-old down coat. “It kept me warm in Alaska,” he said. “It should take care of those Siberian winds.”

  I hugged my dad and told him I’d be back in April when he had his bladder removed. He said it was too far and my responsibilities were too great; my family needed me in China.

  “But my family also needs me in America,” I replied. “We’ll work it out and I’ll be back.”

  Early in the spring, Tom called to say he was coming to Beijing to empty out the house. They had officially signed papers saying they weren’t returning, and the company wanted the house off the books. It seemed a cold-blooded request, but I was happy to see my friend.

  He tried to be optimistic, but the prognosis was grim. Doctors had given Cathy a slim chance of survival. I once again kept him company as he packed up his house, including wrapping up the ornaments on the withered Christmas tree.

  The next day, my family and I left for a long-planned trip, which we had delayed to see Tom. We hugged good-bye in front of his house again.

  While on the trip I finished a close-to-the-bone column about Dixie’s illness and how it affected me from so far away. I labored over every word and felt like I was publicly exposing my emotions more than I ever had, making the flood of supportive reader e-mail particularly moving. One message especially struck me, beginning with one simple line:

  Reading your column, I was frankly overcome with envy over your relationship with your father.

  It took a stranger’s note for me to acknowledge the obvious, that I really loved my father and greatly valued our relationship, and that the thought of him being gone was turning my world upside down.