A Writer's Life (72 page)

As it turned out, I had a fortuitious meeting with one of the guests, a slender, sandy-haired man in his thirties named Chris Billing, the Beijing bureau chief of NBC News. During and after dinner, he questioned me about my work, and, even before I had sought his help, he seemed to understand what I needed and volunteered to assist me. Unlike most foreign correspondents who were married and had children, Chris Billing was a bachelor and he liked going out at night. He had a car, a driver, and spoke fluent Mandarin. He also played tennis two or three times a week, and, at his suggestion, I met him for mixed doubles the following afternoon at my hotel's tennis facility, where he introduced me to our partners,
two English-speaking Chinese women in their early thirties, who turned out to be excellent players.

Our games were often disturbed, however, by the ringing sounds coming from the cell phones that the women had left in their handbags near the net posts. Putting aside their rackets, they would hasten toward their phones, apologizing to Chris and me for interrupting our game, but it was clear they believed their calls were important,
too
important to ignore. I think both women held executive positions within private firms; both were married to successful husbands (too busy to play tennis), and one of the women (or maybe both) had a youngster at home being cared for by a nanny or a grandmother. In any case, Chris and I played
singles
while our doubles partners stood on the sidelines holding tiny gleaming phones to their ears and jabbering in Mandarin perhaps to a colleague in the office or, indeed, to a “little emperor” at home. But despite these interruptions, I enjoyed being back on a tennis court and was pleased to have in Chris Billing a new American friend who knew his way around Beijing and was including me in his social plans.

The two of us dined that night in a back-street restaurant in a congested residential area with cobblestoned alleyways lined with single-level courtyard houses. During the evening, I alluded to my recent visit to Tiananmen Square, which led Billing to invite me to the NBC office the following day to view several hours of tape taken during the six-week confrontation of 1989. It was an offer I accepted. I was also grateful to him a week later: He was expected briefly in New York, and while there he saw my wife, Nan, and volunteered to carry back to China a suitcase containing some of my suits and other clothing made of a heavier fabric than what I had brought with me to Beijing a month earlier following our fortieth-anniversary cruise in the Mediterranean. But before he left Beijing, he gave me the phone number of a woman whom he hoped was what I was seeking in an interpreter. She was a refined and highly educated woman, he said, who both spoke and wrote English, and, since she had recently retired from a full-time position, she had flexible hours and was looking forward to hearing from me. Her name was Fu Cuihua.

I promptly telephoned Madam Fu, and she said she would come to my hotel as soon as she could, maybe within the hour. This pleased me because I had just received a fax written in Chinese—sent by Chen Jun of the soccer association's advertising department—and I was eager to have it translated. In less than an hour, the concierge notified me that Madam Fu had arrived in the lobby and was on her way up. I left my suite on the fourteenth floor and walked down the hall to meet her at the elevator. When the door opened, I saw a tiny woman coming out unsteadily but
with determined resolve. She seemed not to notice me as she hurried past, taking several mincing steps in the wrong direction while holding on to the wall with one hand for support.

“Madam Fu?” I called out, pursuing her from behind. “Madam Fu?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, stopping and turning around. She regarded me with a tentative smile. Refocusing her eyes from behind her steel-framed spectacles, she said, “I'm afraid I am a little dizzy. These elevators go so fast, they make me dizzy.”

“Would you like to hold on to my arm?” I asked as she removed her hand from the wall.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I will be fine once I sit down. It just takes a while for me to get used to how fast the elevators are in these tall buildings.” I guessed that Madam Fu was in her sixties, if not older. She was not much taller than five feet and weighed maybe one hundred pounds. She was demurely dressed, wearing what might have been in vogue during the days when Chinese women first ceased to emulate the fashion of Chairman Mao.

She followed me through the corridor, then into my suite. Seeing a cushioned chair, she headed toward it and sank into it. “Water,” she said, “I could use a bit of water.” I removed a bottle from the refrigerator and poured the contents into a wineglass and handed it to her. As she slowly sipped from the glass, she glanced around the room at the polished paneling, the mirrored backbar, the pale blue damask pillows on the sofa, and the coffee table, on which was a vase containing the fresh flowers that were brought in daily by the chambermaid. In the far corner of the room was a banquet table that served as my desk, and, in its center, surrounded by stacks of folders and yellow lined pads, was an electric typewriter I had borrowed from the concierge. He had retrieved it from the storage room, where it had been discarded by the secretary of the banquet manager after she had switched to a computer. “Nobody uses typewriters in China anymore,” the concierge explained after dispatching a porter to bring it to me. It was an IBM Wheelwriter 3 model, exactly like the ones I had purchased twenty-five years ago and continued to use in New York and New Jersey.

After Madam Fu had drunk less than half of the water, and had politely waved off my attempt to refill her glass, she asked: “You are a writer?”

“I try to be,” I said.

“Well, then, “she said with a snap in her voice, “how is it that I can be of service to you?”

I was pleased that she spoke English in such a clear and formal manner, preferring to associate it with my younger years, when people seemed to
communicate with more care and when an IBM electric typewriter was less anachronistic.

“I just received this fax written in Chinese,” I said. “It comes from a woman named Chen Jun, who is employed by the soccer assocation. Are you well enough now to translate it for me?”

“I shall try,” she said, taking the page in her tiny hands, which were as small as a child's. She studied the writing for several seconds, her eyebrows arched over the rim of her glasses, her facial expression absorbed with intensity. “This message was not written by Chen Jun,” she said. “It was forwarded to you from the office of Chen Jun, but it is composed by someone named Liu Ying.”

“She's the soccer player I'm interested in,” I explained.

“Well, in this message she is actually telling you about her mother,” Madam Fu went on. Liu Ying must have been told about my forthcoming meeting with her mother, I thought; then I listened as Madam Fu began to translate aloud:

“ ‘It was very difficult for my mother to bring up her three children because she had to overcome a lot of difficulties. Even when I was very young I loved sports and I needed to be strong to do the exercises, so my mother often cooked special food just for me. My mother doesn't understand soccer and she does not go to watch the games. I began to live in the school's dormitory at the age of twelve, and would only go back home on holidays. But my mother gives me a mother's love. She has been my spiritual pillar.…' ”

Madam Fu's voice began to weaken, and then she paused.

“I am sorry,” she said finally, “but I feel like I am about to fall on the floor.”

“Let me call the hotel doctor,” I quickly said, and she nodded and asked if she could lie down. I showed her into the bedroom and she stretched out on top of the covers and waited until the doctor arrived. He went in to see her, and when he came out, he told me she would be all right, but urged that we put her in a taxi and let her go home, where she could rest.

Together, we walked Madam Fu down the hall toward the elevator, and she was very apologetic. I arranged for a hotel car, and gave her the fee for her time, although she accepted it with reluctance. After she had gone, I thanked the doctor and returned to the lobby, thinking that I must not let Chris Billing know about this incident, nor should I further depend upon Patrick Wang of Nike. These men had done too much for me already; from now on, I decided, I must be more on my own.

I noticed a stack of
China Daily
newspapers on the side of the
concierge's counter and it then occurred to me to contact one of the editors there; surely, since it was an English-language periodical, it was a likely place for me to seek advice and perhaps even be introduced to a candidate. After the concierge had arranged for me to see one of the editors there whom he knew and had accompanied me to the taxi stand and given the directions to the driver, I was on my way to the
China Daily
building, which I reached in less than twenty minutes. It was an L-shaped white modern structure lined by large rectangular-shaped sealed windows, and behind its wide glass entranceway was a marble-floored lobby. The receptionist was expecting me, and, after a guard had escorted me up the elevator into a conference room, I was greeted by a smiling Asian gentleman in his mid-fifties who wore a bow tie and a dark suit and spoke English in the same exacting manner as Madam Fu.

“So, I understand you are an authority on the game of soccer as played by youthful Chinese women,” he began.

“Not exactly,” I said, “but I am interested in one of the players.” I had already described my story idea so often to so many people that I could relate it by rote, and so I barely listened to myself as I now succinctly recounted to the editor the circumstances that had drawn me into the orbit of Liu Ying, my following in the trajectory of an errant kick through a dozen time zones into the Orient in search of what I was yet eager to discover. The editor appeared to be puzzled by what I was saying, and so he abruptly changed the subject and asked, “May I show you our newsroom?”

As I followed him through the corridor, he explained that the
China Daily
, which was founded in 1981, had a circulation of about 300,000 and was the only English-language newspaper in the nation. It was read mainly by Chinese natives who were learning English and by Westerners who were touring or residing here. Among the paper's dozens of staff members were four or five Americans who held annual contracts as grammarians—“polishers” was how he referred to them, and they were expected to review all the words and phrases written in English by the Chinese headline writers and reporters and to make sure that everything was properly parsed and nothing was printed that might represent “Chinglish.” He did not offer examples of “Chinglish,” and I thought it imprudent of me to request any; but I guessed that what he had in mind were such sentences as I had recently seen printed on a sign displayed in a flea market frequented by tourists:
TAKE MORE CARE OF YOUR BELON GINGS
.

The newsroom of the
China Daily
consisted of rows and rows of cubicles, within which men and women sat silently facing computer screens. There are modern newsrooms similar to this one in thousands
of cities throughout the world, I thought, from Beijing to Copenhagen to Denver, vast and muted spaces in which people of many colors and languages practice journalism in an ambience so different from what I knew as a young man working on the third floor at the
Times
, where three hundred reporters could be seen at a single glance, making clattering sounds with their fingertips on the metal keyboards of bell-ringing typewriters, their facial expressions alternating between frustration and satisfaction, all within view of everyone else, and all calling aloud to copyboys whenever they wanted their completed stories to be rushed to an editor. Journalism was then performed with resonance and impartible vivacity, whereas it was now the work of walled-in scriveners delivering stories to their editors with the click of a mouse. It was so quiet within the
China Daily
's crowded newsroom that I could distinctly hear, rising from a cubicle, the sound of a soft-spoken man conversing on a telephone in an accented American voice that I took to be Texan.

“Who's that talking on the phone?” I asked the editor.

“His name is Mr. Charles Dukes. He is one of our polishers.”

“Would you allow me to have a word with him?”

“No problem,” said the editor, “as soon as he completes his call.”

Within minutes I was being introduced to Charles J. Dukes, a stocky, square-jawed middle-aged man who had a full head of chestnut brown hair and a carefully clipped goatee that was almost entirely gray.

“I'd be glad to talk to you,” Charles Dukes said after we had shaken hands, “but I have to get out of here for a while and get something to eat. I'm due back in an hour.”

“May I join you?” I asked. Dukes looked at the editor, exchanged some words in Chinese, and then said, “Sure.”

After I had thanked the editor, I followed Dukes out of the building and across the street into one of the typical neighborhood restaurants that the Chinese referred to as a
huoguo
, and that Americans called a “hot pot,” because in the center of each table was a cauldron filled with bubbling broth surrounded by trays of raw meat, vegetables, and hot peppers. The customers seated at the tables would drop their selected food into the cauldrons with their chopsticks, and seconds later would dip their chopsticks back into the cauldrons and retrieve the now steaming and cooked morsels of food ready to be eaten. Dukes started out with an appetizer of something I did not recognize, while I ordered only a bottle of Tsingtao beer, which the waiter poured so freely that the foam flowed onto the tablecloth.

Dukes told me that he had come to Beijing during the previous year, having applied to the
China Daily
after he had seen a help-wanted ad
placed by the paper on the Internet during the spring of 1998. At that time he had been editing his hometown weekly in Malakoff, Texas, a position that he liked well enough but did not mind leaving, being a divorcé with grown children and thus at liberty to accept whatever he thought might reawaken what was left of his sense of adventure. Although he had majored in journalism at the University of Texas in Arlington, and had been a staff writer for ten years on the
Athens Daily Review
in Athens, Texas, he had intermittently left Texas journalism to accept consulting jobs with oil companies and other multinational corporations that sponsored his travels in the Middle East, Europe, Peru, the North Sea, and the Arctic Slope. He had earlier learned Mandarin while earning a master's degree in Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, and he said that this had probably weighed in his favor when he had submitted his application to the
China Daily
. But his interest in Asia actually dated back to 1967, he said. He was then twenty years old, embarking on a tour as a U.S. paratrooper in Vietnam.