Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

China Mountain Zhang (22 page)

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang

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“What’s wrong?” I finally ask.

“A friend of mine is going to be arrested,” he says.

Liu Wen? No it can’t be. I wait.

He clasps his hands behind his back. “He is a teacher,” he says. “They are arresting him on a morals charge, but it’s more complicated than that.”

I think, it always is. And I am relieved it isn’t Liu Wen.

“I feel sorry for him,” Haitao says, “of course. They’ll send him to Xinjiang Province, to do Reform Through Labor. Do you know, if you misbehave in a labor camp, one of the punishments is to wire your thumbs together? They draw the wire very tight. It cuts off the blood. You have to eat rice out of a bowl like a dog, without using your hands. And then gangrene sets in and they cut your thumbs off. Or maybe you die.”

What’s to say? At home they used to send people to the corridor out west, convict labor. Now, sometimes they send them to Mars. Convict labor. Chinese citizens do not usually have much interest in going to the moon or Mars.

“I think we are a disease in society,” Haitao says. “Bad cells. I think something has gone wrong with us.”

“In my country there’s a bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests,” I say. “The other birds don’t know. They think this baby is their own. They raise it and feed it, in some ways it becomes
almost a monster because it grows so large and demands so much. But eventually it simply leaves the nest, like any other bird. It’s not a monster, it’s really just another part of things. I think we’re like those baby birds. We didn’t ask for this, our parents didn’t ask for this. No one is guilty, just maybe unlucky.”

“So you think that we’re accidents,” Haitao says. He sounds sarcastic.

I shrug, even though he’s not looking at me. That’s what I think, and if he doesn’t, that’s okay.

“I’m afraid,” he says. “If they interrogate my friend, they may arrest me.”

I say delicately, “Perhaps you have a friend who can help you, someone who perhaps helped you transfer out of your teaching job … .”

“No,” he says curtly.

It crosses my mind that if they arrest him and interrogate him, perhaps I will be arrested as well. But it seems too improbable to concern me.

He is still at the window, looking out with the city as a backdrop. This flat is like a theater for him, a shadow box for his own display. I get up and walk behind him, put my hand on his shoulder. He is trembling, like some small animal. I stroke his hair, he leans back against me and I wrap my arm around his waist. He turns his head so he is looking away from me and relaxes against me, his profile expressionless in the reflecting window. I tighten my grip, feeling his buttocks and back pressed against my stomach and groin, his fine skull under my fingers. Slowly the shaking subsides.

There’s no doubt that his fear is real. But I cannot help but notice the flicker of the whites in the reflection of his eyes as he glances toward the window. He adjusts ever so slightly, improving the line, perfecting the pose.

“Don’t worry,
haibao,
” I say, thinking how “seal” fits him, how sleek both he and seals are, “you are a perfect picture.”

He laughs, shakily. “You see through me.”

I don’t really understand him at all, but I kiss his hair rather than answer, running my fingers across his chest. His pulse beats visibly in his temple.

“No,” he says, chiding, “we must study engineering.” His voice is playful and so I pay no attention, sliding my hand under the waist of his tights.

He sighs. “At least,” he says softly, “we must darken the windows.”

“Oh no,” I say brightly, pulling my hand away, letting go, straightening his clothes like a mother with a toddler, “we must study engineering.”

He growls at me, baring even, perfect little teeth like pearls.

I laugh, “First we study engineering and then we screw.”

He gapes, astonished. “Did I hear you right? The namesake of Zhong Shan, vulgar?”

We do study engineering. I get my questions answered, draw out the session, teasing him, distracting him, pretending to be serious. It’s a little like pressball, everything done by indirection. When I think his attention is wandering I press my thigh against his. I bring him a beer, brush fingers when I hand it to him, reach over and drink from his without asking while I watch him over the rim, and he watches me.

Finally I admit I have no more questions and kiss him. He grabs my hand and pulls me towards the bedroom, but I laugh and hang back, stopping him in the doorway where I press him against the frame, peal down his tights and go down on him there. He gasps, and laughs and swears at me, his hands wrapped rather painfully in my hair. Only after he comes do we make it to the bed.

Late, he dozes next to me and my arm is draped over his chest. I look into the darkness. It is about one. Peter is at work in New York, joking with Rebecca, the girl who does all the correspondence and filing. Peter would be astonished and proud of me, to
know I have done so well with Haitao. To see me thinking about someone else in this way.

“A ministering angel,” he would say, “a regular Florence Nightingale.”

Peter, who so often did the same for me.

I am terribly homesick.

Haitao helps me with my engineering, a classmate, Wai Ling Zhung Fan, graciously helps me with my engineering. Even Xiao Chen, who knows nothing about engineering, uses my notes to ask me about my engineering. The midterm examination is very difficult, I work until the end of the hour and still do not get a real answer for question six. I walk out despondent, knowing that I missed at least three questions completely, and parts of many others. For days I will not stop at the Professor’s office and look at the grades posted on a flimsie on the door. But the Professor’s office is next to my Practical Applications class (my tool-handling class) so one day I simply go and look. And I have passed the engineering midterm with a score of 62 points out of 100 which on the grade curve is an 86%! I didn’t know there would be a curve! I thought a 62 would be a failing grade!

Of course I go straight up to the arcade (the University is the base on which the four towers rest). I take the lift to his flat and then stand outside his door in an agony of apprehension. I have never come on Haitao unannounced. And each day it is problematical as to whether Haitao will be pleased to see me or too despondent to care. Some days he is all wit and languid charm. Some days he is silent and withdrawn. Always he knows I am coming.

I imagine him opening the door smiling. Open the door frowning. Someone else there.

So I go back to the lift, take it back down and call from the arcade. I jack in and think the numbers in careful Chinese—the
system will understand English, and thinking out the call in Chinese is not second nature yet, but it’s good practice to do everything in Chinese. Then there is a wait so long that I think he is gone. Perhaps in a meeting with his thesis Professor? Not that I have ever seen Haitao work on his thesis, but then I’m never there during the day.

“
Wai,
” he says, Chinese for Hey and the way everyone answers the phone. No vid, sound only.

“Venerable teacher,” I say, “this is your undeserving student.”

“Who?” he says, he sounds as if he has just woken up.

“Zhang,” I say. “It’s Zhang. Did I call at a bad time?”

“Zhang?” he says. “No, you didn’t call at a bad time. What is it? Something wrong?”

“No, I just wanted to tell you I passed my engineering midterm. And say thank you for your help.”

“Oh, you passed? Excellent.” He is trying to sound interested, pleased, but the effort is apparent in his voice.

“An 86%,” I say.

“An 86%?” he says, “so high? When did you find out? I thought you weren’t going to check.”

“I had to, better to know the worst than anticipate. I just wanted to tell you, I didn’t want to disturb you. I’ll see you tomorrow evening as usual?”

“Right, right.” A pause. “Where are you now?”

“On the arcade,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, “are you busy?”

“Oh, sure,” I say, “there are all these incredible men lined up waiting to spend the afternoon with an engineering genius.”

He laughs and sounds a little more like himself. “Tell them to go away and come up. No wait, tell them to keep you entertained, buy you lunch or something, and give me thirty minutes. Everything is, ah, let me think of the Zhang way to say this,” his voice changes, he speaks softly and mimics my American accent and northern pronunciation, “things are a bit untidy, and if you do not
mind, I must inconvenience you a little, respectfully request you wait.”

“Ta ma-da,”
I say, Your mother. “Just get dressed and come down to the coffee bar. Go shopping with me. Show this poor confused foreigner what clothes to buy that will make him look less like he comes from a second-rate country.”

“Mao Zedong and Lenin, I thought you’d never ask,” he says and breaks the connection.

But it is twenty-five minutes before he shows up. I am sitting in the coffee bar nursing my coffee—or at least the sweetened syrup that passes for coffee in this country—when Haitao stops in the doorway. He scans the room, which is full of students. His gaze flickers past me a couple of times, although I wave. He is pale and lost; his hair looks as if he has run his fingers through it, his long yellow and green tunic doesn’t match his tights. At last he sees me. He puts his head down and enters the crowd like a swimmer making a long dive.

“Do you want anything?” I ask him when he slides into the seat.

He shakes his head.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says. “Where do you want to go shopping?”

“I don’t know, where do you go?”

“We don’t want you to look too much like a fag,” he says, off hand. “Why have you got your hair that way?”

My hair is tied back in a ponytail. I keep it shoulder length so there’s not much tail. “I had my tool-handling class today, I like to keep it out of my eyes when I work.”

“It looks nice,” he says.

“It looks
huaqiao,”
I say. “I think maybe I should cut it.”

“No, don’t,” he says. “Please don’t.”

The din makes it hard to carry on this conversation. Students call to each other in nasal, six-toned Nanjing dialect and shrill four-toned Mandarin. At home, my non-Chinese speaking friends
say Chinese conversations often sound like arguments. I wonder how long it will be until I hear the liquid vowels of Spanish again.
“Yan Chun!”
the young man next to me shouts,
“Yan Chun! Zouba!”
Let’s go. Across the floor, a tall young man with an open face, dressed as if he just came off the gym floor, turns and smiles.
“Shemma?”
What? The Mandarin word for a good time is
renao,
hot-noisy.

“Let’s go,” I say.

The arcade is busy, too. Haitao has his hands jammed in his tunic pockets, and moves with his head down.

I want to get out of this, to some place where it is quiet and private. Sometimes I take real pleasure in being with a person when there are all these straight people around and that person and I are just two people together. But right now Haitao and I aren’t together, he is there and I am here and the physical space between us is not nearly so vast as the emotional distance. But I can’t suggest we go to his flat, since he made a point of telling me it was a mess. I can’t take him to my dorm because Xiao Chen might bring friends back from class and then we’d have no privacy and have to act straight.

So we walk down to the bus stop. “Have you heard any more about your friend?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I talked to someone back home last night. He said my friend is still suspended from teaching, but nothing else. Everyone is still waiting.”

“How did they find out about your friend?” I ask.

“It’s complicated,” he says.

Rebuffed, I say nothing.

The sun is hard on the street. Traffic is not heavy at midday, a street sweeper running off a power line raises and absorbs clouds of yellow dust. The window across the street is full of empty bird cages; in a square of sunlight, a white cat sleeps beneath them. It doesn’t feel like home, the light is different or something. Maybe when I go back to New York I’ll get a cat. Chinese people
do not keep pets very much, it seems particularly Western to make an animal a member of the family.

“The District Superintendent of Education is a fag,” Haitao says. “He hired my friend and me. He was arrested in a park. Then my friend was suspended. That’s all anyone really knows.”

The District Superintendent must be how Haitao got to study engineering. It must be a big scandal that someone in education is gay, someone so important, a big person.

“Do you think they’ll be looking for you? The school hasn’t suspended you.”

“Not yet,” Haitao says. Chinese never say no.

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang

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