Читать книгу Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao - Jonathan Tel - Страница 9

ELVIS HAS LEFT BEIJING

They were sisters, but of course they were not sisters. (That would be contrary to government policy.) Their families had lived side by side in the Shijingshan District of Beijing for many generations. They were born during the same calendar year, but in different traditional years—Linlin, a month older, was a Monkey and Feifei a Rooster. Perhaps that made the difference.

When she was twelve, Linlin had her first period and a month later so did Feifei. Linlin kissed a boy when she was sixteen; a month later, Feifei. They went through various teenage enthusiasms together, too—their calligraphy phase, their boy band phase, their phase of crushes on other girls. On the parapet of a warehouse destined for demolition the spray-painted slogan appeared: WOMAN’S DESTINY IS TO RULE OVER MAN; they accomplished this when they were seventeen, the year they both lost their virginity.

To everyone’s surprise they scored high on the national exam and got into college. They decided they would take their future seriously. They had a gift for languages; they watched American movies and British TV series, and haunted the English Corner to ask questions of native speakers.

On graduating they both accepted a position at a multinational company (not the same one). Their work was a little humdrum. A more urgent topic engrossed them: Whom should they choose as their first real boyfriend? He’d be somebody more senior than themselves, earning a decent salary, aiming high. But should he be Chinese or a foreigner? They listed the advantages of each.

Chinese:

• Understands your background.

• You understand his.

• Can meet his parents.

• Shares common goals.

Foreigner:

• Enchanted by you.

• Thinks you’re beautiful. (If you have any flaws, he’s unaware of them.)

• Makes bitchy girls jealous of you. (“What does he see in her?”)

• Lets you get away with whatever you want.

They sat in a fast-food restaurant near Qianmen and giggled about it. Should they two-time their imaginary boyfriends, sampling one of each type? But they weren’t that kind of girl. No, what made sense was for the two sisters, between them, to do what neither could alone. Linlin took a sachet of soy sauce and one of ketchup. She held them behind her back, shuffling them to and fro. She stretched out her fists for Feifei to choose from.

Feifei tensed. She felt—which was unusual—envy, though she didn’t know what Linlin would be getting that she herself would not.

A tap on the right fist.

It opened.

Ketchup.

Linlin saw a tremble on her sister’s lips, a disappointment. “You know,” she said generously, “You can choose your own fate.” She opened her other fist now—and Feifei reached out and grasped the familiar soy sauce, and pressed it, like a doll pillow, against her cheek.

So Linlin’s destiny was ketchup. The sisters felt they could live with the decision. From here on, they understood, their true education would begin. They bought a single order of french fries, sharing it between them, each dipping the fries into her own sauce.

For her first foreigner, Linlin picked Andy; she might as well go for somebody who speaks the Queen’s English. He was from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and had arrived in China two weeks previously, to work at her company. He was skinny with auburn curls and the whitest of complexions; she could never decide if he was very beautiful or very ugly. For his part, he was eager to have a Chinese girlfriend to “show him the ropes.” She thought she might celebrate by giving herself an English nickname—Linda, perhaps? But Andy talked her out of it. “Nothing wrong with Lin,” he said, “It’s my dental hygienist’s name.”

“My friends call me Linlin.”

“Even better,” he said, ogling her breasts. “Double your pleasure, double your fun!”

As well as improving her English she learned Western customs. (For example, Andy drank a glass of cold water with every meal.) The sex was not bad; she could be less self-conscious with him, knowing that he fancied her not as an individual but as a race. She asked him to speak English idioms in bed (“You’re a nice bit of skirt!”) but this embarrassed him, and she had to settle for his repertory of grunts.

She confided all this in her sister, who asked, “Those folds in the eyelids, do you think they’re attractive, Big Sister?”

“His eyes look like belly buttons!” And the sisters laughed.

After they’d been together a fortnight, one Sunday Andy took Linlin to a pub in Wudaoku, The Three Feathers, to show her off to his mates. It was fascinating to be among Englishmen en masse. The more beer they drank, the redder their cheeks became. Some bloke with sideburns persuaded her to have a bite of his Yorkshire pudding, which was, to her surprise, delicious. She could generally follow their chatter; their indispensable word was wanker—an insult, but also a term of friendship (much as, she thought, Chinese men address each other as “turtle egg”). Male camaraderie, even in the most genial of forms, always has a whiff of eros and of danger. There was gossip about somebody’s old school friend who’d been found dead in a hotel room; they laughed at this, but then, Westerners laugh at almost anything.

The pub filled up with more foreigners, and some Chinese too, and she discovered this was not a random gathering but an event organized by the Beijing chapter of the Hash House Harriers. “Drinkers with running problems,” Sideburns explained with a smirk. They meet every Sunday, each time in a different neighborhood. They jog together, stopping for booze along the way. To make it more fun, one person reconnoiters ahead carrying a bag containing flour, with a tennis ball in it which he bounces as he goes, to leave a trail. Then off in pursuit the Hashers run.

“Is there a prize for coming first?” she asked. “Do some people get lost?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Andy.

It was an exhilarating and exotic experience. A typical Hasher was white and male, from Britain or the Commonwealth. There was a quota of Americans and of Europeans too, even Indians and a Nigerian, and she was far from unique: several men had brought their Chinese girlfriends. (She small-talked to these others in English, which was like acting in a play.) Jealously she noticed Andy staring at somebody’s cleavage stickered HELLO! I’M MEIXIN YANG! (the name in back-to-front order, the way it’s done in English, as if the individual could take precedence over the family) but, far from flirting, the woman quizzed him about the accounting procedures in his company.

The jog began, some loping athletically, others panting and shuffling. Those near the front shouted, “On, on!” while the “slow coaches” trailed after.

She and Andy came back the following Sunday, and almost every Sunday through that dusty, cool spring. It was a ritual; something to look forward to. In other respects Andy was not so satisfactory (he drank too much, and then he was no good in bed) but the Hash linked them. She became a familiar face; the men collectively flirted with her. “Is Lin lean?” they’d ask, and she’d respond, coping with the vowels, “Yes, Lin’s lean.” For some reason, this was considered funny.

Singing was an important part of the Hash—reminding her of her time in the Young Pioneers. For example, if a woman had small breasts (all Chinese women were deemed to fit into this category) the men would serenade her:

She’s all right

She’s all right

She’s got no tits

But she’s all right!

whereas if hers were large:

She’s all right

She’s all right

She’s got a great big rack

But she’s too white!

By the time the Hash reached this drunken, uproarious stage, she’d grab Andy’s hand and prepare to go home.

In April, quite suddenly, Andy departed. (He got a posting in Lagos.) At the farewell Hash his mates sang, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,”

Fuck off! You wank! Fuck off! You wank!

Fuck off! You wank! Fuck off!

Fuck off! You wank! Fuck off! You wank!

Fuck off! You wank! Fuck off!

She described all this to her sister, who put her hand over her mouth and smiled. “They are foolish. But you’re improving your English, and you’re making connections. That will help you find a better boyfriend, Big Sister.”

Linlin remained in the Hash and found her subsequent dates through it. Paul from Northern Ireland. Brian the New Zealander (their big quarrel came when she informed him the kiwi was originally a Chinese fruit, and he said, “You people think you invented everything!”). Jean-Phi from Belgium. Finally, in July, George, an American.

The younger sister had a less varied love life. A month after Linlin went on her first Hash, Feifei accepted an invitation from a manager in her company, Chen Rong. (He was in Compliance, and liaised with her section on a regular basis.) They went for a stroll in Ritan Park after work. He was a short man with glasses and an odd speech defect, pronouncing sh like s, which (though he was from an old Beijing family) made him sound as if he was from somewhere like Taiwan.

A week later, she had Yunnanese crossing-the-bridge noodles with him.

A week later, the first kiss.

A week later, she met his mother, with whom he lived.

And the following week Feifei asked Rong his dream. He said he wanted to be promoted within the company, and one day reach a senior position in the Beijing office. According to the internet: People born in the Year of the Rooster are virtuous, constant, and financially lucky. An excellent choice of partner would be a person born in the Year of the Ox. . . . And Chen Rong was an Ox!

It wasn’t till June that Linlin (who was then in the process of breaking up with Jean-Phi) got a text from Feifei: she and Rong were in a hotel near the Great Wall. Feifei was in provocative lingerie that her sister had helped her choose, and Rong was taking a preliminary shower. Linlin texted back at once: Good luck! An hour later, the reply: It was amazing! followed by a string of emoticons to express the Little Sister’s delight.

The sisters tried to switch from text to speech, but the reception was poor; they could only hear fragments of each other. “I’m losing you,” they kept crying. And when they next met, the following evening, beaming Feifei announced that Rong had proposed marriage. And how romantically! He’d taken their mingled pubic hairs and pressed them on the steamed-up bathroom mirror in the shape of the double-happiness sign! It turned out that on top of his salary he had an extra income (he supplied business analysis to a banker named Qin) and useful family connections (his maternal uncle was a high-ranking cadre). He owned an apartment in Haidian; the housing market was soaring; it was sure to be a solid investment. The sisters hugged; they jumped up and down together, till Feifei got a nosebleed, which, as Linlin pointed out, signifies passionate love, in the case of cartoon characters anyway.

*

George was a step up on Linlin’s previous boyfriends; though no older, he seemed more mature. He’d worked for the federal government. “In the US, China’s the whipping boy, but you get a different perspective when you’re actually here.” He was making a determined effort to learn Mandarin. His career was advancing too: so many opportunities to practice international law, which would be impossible in America. She didn’t officially move in with him, but stayed in his apartment in Dongzhimen most nights, shortening her commute. He referred to his favorite kind of sex with her as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—a pun that he explained at length.

Like her, too, he perceived himself as an outsider at the Hash. “It’s like a Brit having the hots for a Hollywood star, or being a fan of the Yankees—he loves them just as much as we do, but he knows they’re not his.” A consideration might have been that he was worried about his waistline (he was a devotee of a diet which permits protein and fat but forbids carbohydrates; his standby was steak) and puffed when he ran.

He narrated the myth of origin. In colonial Kuala Lumpur, in the 1930s, a group of British accountants used to lunch every day at their club, which they nicknamed the Hash House; they took it on themselves to run to and from it. The founder of the Hash House Harriers died in Singapore during the War. Afterward the organization was re-founded, and spread among expats around the world. Linlin had a paternal great-uncle whose black-and-white photograph was on the family shrine; she knew practically nothing about him except that he too had been killed by the Japanese. Now the Hash didn’t seem quite so exotic. She envisioned the ghost of Great-Uncle Xie, tipsy and cheery, scampering along with the Hashers.

Once upon a time, a man in Shanghai was cycling past a residential building when a fire extinguisher fell on him, injuring his shoulder. It must have come from one of the apartments, but there was no knowing which. He sued, and all the residents had to pay their share of his compensation.

This was a precedent for a case George was dealing with. A client of his, an American company with a subsidiary in Guangdong, operated a factory that might or might not have been polluting the water table. If his client’s factory wasn’t the cause, it was one of a number of local factories. The nearby villagers were suing the owners of all the factories. George was trying to get the case transferred to American jurisdiction, in which case (he was confident) his client would win.