I Stand Corrected (16 page)

“I grant you that, but I want to see what the train station looks like,” I told him.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party constructed ten monumental buildings, the Beijing Railway Station being one. Experts from the Soviet Union were enlisted for their technical guidance, while two million Chinese construction workers completed the project in just over seven months. In 1959, Chairman Mao inaugurated the building by writing the calligraphic characters on the station sign as “The East Is Red” was played.

After being informed that the station’s traffic surges to thousands of people during the day, I thought it best to take the overnight train.

“We still need to arrive well in advance,” said Gilliam.

“I don’t see why. I’ve already got our tickets,” I pointed out.

“It’s not like checking in at the airport with your executive platinum card,” my son told me.

We arrived two hours before our train’s ten o’clock departure and found the building’s vast square crammed with travelers, most of whom were chain-smoking.

As a traveler of many foreign lands, I have come to believe
that one’s mistrust should give way to fatalism when nothing else is clear. As soon as I realized we were at the mercy of fate, I succumbed to the train station’s solid block of humanity. There was no space to sit—not even on our suitcases—and so we stood with hundreds of others, waiting to snake toward a location I couldn’t see but assumed was the platform.

Gilliam is six foot five. With his imposing height and command of the language, he took the lead, and I held tightly to his shirttail.

By the time we made our way onto the platform, the crowd had thinned, but, strangely, those in our immediate area continued to crowd together. Twice I stepped away from a man standing too close before realizing that his cheek-by-jowl inclination was not the strategic positioning of a pickpocket, nor was it the precursor to a grope. It had to do with the absence of personal space in a country whose enormous population had long ago grown connective tissue.

Entering the first-class car, we shimmied sideways along a narrow hall. When finally we arrived at our compartment, I opened its door to a space so small that it was nearly impossible to close the door behind us once we’d stepped into it.

All twelve square feet of the cabin were covered in a layer of grime. The rancid smell of cigarette smoke permeated the bunk bed, which barely accommodated my full length and was half a foot shy of Gilliam’s. As the train pulled away from the station, Gilliam and I sat side by side in dazed silence on the lower bunk, staring blankly at a dirty wall two feet in front of us.

I reached in my purse for the herbal sleep remedy purchased two months before from the
yao popo
, the medicine woman, in Dongzhimen to combat my jet lag when I first arrived in China. Sleep had come on its own that week. The tablets were left in my purse.

“What’s that?” asked Gilliam as I unwrapped a compressed pellet of herbs from its rice paper.

“I either force sleep or throw myself off the train,” I said.

“Be careful,” suggested Gilliam, swinging himself onto the
upper berth. “Chinese herbs can be narcotic—and with you, cold medicine is a gateway drug.”

I have a freakishly low resistance to pills and alcohol. Two aspirins have been known to put me in a slurred state. But this was different. After all, these were only dried herbs.

“I’m not worried,” I told Gilliam before swallowing the bitter-tasting tablet. “The Chinese have used medicinals for centuries.”

“But you don’t speak Chinese. How did you manage to tell the
yao popo
what you wanted?” asked Gilliam. “Mother …?”

Gilliam looked down to discover that I’d slumped into a comatose sleep. So quickly and completely had the herbs taken effect that my feet were still on the floor.

Gilliam breached male-female etiquette as he frantically sifted through the contents of my purse until he found a pocket mirror, which he shoved under my nose to make sure I was still breathing.

I woke the next morning with absolutely no recollection of the night before.

“You’ve got to get a grip on the language,” Gilliam said in a severe tone.

“Please, no lectures,” I told him. “I’m not feeling myself.”

“I mean it. Don’t go anywhere near the herbs again until you learn at least some Chinese.”

“You’re right. I’ll try to learn more of the language,” I promised. “Meanwhile, where are we exactly?” I asked.

Had I posed the same question in Chinese, it would have been as existential as it was practical, for Chinese verbs have no tense, and Chinese adjectives offer no degree of comparison.

Unlike my son, I have a problem learning other languages. Despite my periodic immersion in French, I have beaten all records in how long it has taken me to speak enough of it so that, while in France, I am able to make myself understood by small children and extremely slow-witted adults. Despite this linguistic humiliation, I can rightfully claim a well-informed impression about languages in general, and it seems to me that verbs are their cultural fulcrums.

Turkish verbs include a tense that distinguishes rumor from truth: a clever resource that enforces accountability. The canny French move in the opposite direction with verbs that are convoluted qualifiers. Sturdily independent, action-oriented Americans insist on forceful verbs, which the English subordinate after paving the way with countless niceties. I have been asked to pass the salt at an English table with an inquiry previewed by an apology: “I beg your pardon, but is the salt quite available?”

Verbs in China are unhampered by tense, which enables words to take an invisible leap from one topic, one person, one time to the next. Spoken Mandarin is replete with homophones. Its four tones, as well as the content of what one is saying, act to eliminate ambiguities.

Not for me.

To be fair, how was I expected to grasp the content of sentences that hang in the air attached to nothing at all? Even when I paid close attention, it was impossible to distinguish the four tonal differences. The slightest slip suddenly moved the meaning of a word in an unexpected direction. My mistakes became legendary. One was showcased at the conclusion of a business meeting in Shanghai when I thought I had requested a cab to take me back to the hotel but instead had unintentionally offered my sexual services. Although embarrassed by my declaration, none in the room looked displeased with its possibilities.

N
anjing is on the southern bank of the Yangtze River.

The city’s name translates to “southern capital,” since it was there that China’s first Ming emperor established his capital. The West knows it for the Nanking Massacre, the systematic slaughter of an estimated 300,000 men, women, and children by Japanese troops during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

Roughly 170 Chinese cities have more than one million residents, exceeding the population of many countries. Only four of those cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen—are considered first tier in terms of size and per capita gross domestic product. Nanjing’s designation as a second-tier city strikes me as counterintuitive, for it bustles with commercial activity from all five of the so-called pillar industries: electronics, automobile production, petrochemical, iron and steel, and power.

Bicycles and tuk-tuks skirt the edge of Nanjing’s constant flow of honking cars and trucks, cables crisscross its alleyways and streets like musical bars crowded on sheet music, and it is impossible to escape the noise from the city’s never-ending construction.

Having spent the summer three years prior at the university in Nanjing to improve his Chinese, Gilliam made the decision to postpone the second year at his British university in order to work for a Nanjing businessman by the name of Han Ling.
Mr. Han’s personal wealth counted in the millions, rather than the billions of Chairman. But his fortune, like Chairman’s, came from real estate.

Serendipitous circumstances brought Gilliam and Mr. Han together. Gilliam was to tutor Mr. Han’s son. Upon learning that Gilliam spoke French, Mr. Han hired him instead to work at his luxury jewelry company to resolve a predicament. It happened that Mr. Han had retained the consulting services of a very expensive French designer in Paris who spoke not a word of Chinese. Inconveniently, no one in Mr. Han’s company spoke French. Gilliam spoke both languages. A tutor to Mr. Han’s son one day and the director of international relations the next, Gilliam—at the age of nineteen—oversaw fifty-four employees.

The large number of employees in Mr. Han’s company had to do with his background as a farmer, and his background as a farmer had to do with China’s shifting policies of rural-land ownership.

In his relentless drive toward communism, Mao appropriated privately owned land from what he called China’s “country landlords.” That land became communal property, and the peasants working it were assigned collective ownership. Two decades later, Deng Xiaoping granted private ownership of land parcels to individual workers within the collectives.

The party’s policies toward farmland ownership continued to change until they came full circle. Over the course of Mr. Han’s life, he had worked the land as a child, owned it as a young man, and—in his middle age—sold it to developers. During the recent years of China’s real estate boom, each one of Mr. Han’s land deals led to another, more profitable one, and he became very rich—richer than the pre–Cultural Revolution landowners from whom the land was originally appropriated.

Had it not been for China’s modernization program, Mr. Han’s plan to launch a luxury retail brand would not have taken hold. Thanks to the party’s stated intention to shift China toward a more consumer-oriented economy, the start-up costs for Mr. Han’s company were covered by government subsidies. But the local official had a proviso: Mr. Han must employ the
older men who had worked the farmland he’d sold to developers.

Unable to retrain the men who once worked his land, and intent on finding a way to ensure the continuation of government subsidies for his company—subsidies that would aid in the production of luxury goods for China’s upper-middle class—Mr. Han added a room to his vast office compound where the older men spent their workdays smoking, playing cards, chatting with each other, and watching a large flat-screen TV.

More amazing than the jerry-rigged government subsidies for Mr. Han’s company was its invented provenance. Extensive tax records were created to establish the history of a nonexistent aristocratic French family, one which had designed jewelry for European kings before fleeing France during the French Revolution and settling in Shanghai. How, generations later, the family came upon Mr. Han—a farmer who made good in a province thousands of miles away—is not explained. It need not be. For Mr. Han could produce the family’s official crest, also fabricated. Flamboyantly false documents had been validated the moment the ink dried, and like much of contemporary China, Mr. Han’s company had been successfully transformed from its novelization to nonfiction.

The convivial Mr. Han invited us to dinner our first night in Nanjing.

Gilliam—who would be staying with friends—dropped me off at a hotel I booked online, selected for its Western bathrooms. The hotel’s website had made it look modern. It was anything but.

No matter
, I thought. It would do for my two-night stay.

After unpacking, I decided on a bath. But there was no bathtub, despite the one pictured on the website.

No matter
, I thought as I reached around the shower curtain and ran the hot water. Feeling the urge to make water of my own, I sat on the toilet. For a woman, sitting on a toilet is a mundane act done without thought any number of times during the course of a day. For me, this time was different.

There was the sound of crashing porcelain. Inexplicably,
I found myself sprawled on the floor. Staggering to my feet, I realized that the entire toilet had fallen over.

How could that possibly be?
you might ask.

The answer is simple: the toilet was not a functioning toilet but a stage prop.

I shut the shower off and marched downstairs to the front desk. Lacking the words forced me to pantomime my discontent, but it is virtually impossible to mimic a toilet falling over. So I took the manager to my room and showed him the toilet—still on its side—and made myself understood: I wanted to be moved to another room, one with a toilet that was actually attached to the floor.

“Mr. Han asked that we meet him in his office first,” said Gilliam when he came to the hotel to retrieve me. “He wants to give you a tour. Just nod and go along with everything he says.”

“Is there a reason you’re prepping me?” I asked.

“You’ll see for yourself,” was Gilliam’s cryptic reply.

China’s land supports a population six times as large as it was two centuries ago, and in some areas horticultural techniques have progressed little. Hoeing, transplanting, reaping, threshing, and digging ditches require backbreaking work. Years of physical labor had made Mr. Han look a great deal older than he was. His face was a topographical map of hollows, folds, and crevices. It was fairly obvious that no part of his personal wealth had been spent on a dentist or a tailor. Several of his teeth were missing, and his shirt was stained. The hacking cough plaguing him was a symptom of emphysema, which—if his nicotine-stained fingers were any indication—he appeared to be treating with cigarettes.

Mr. Han was a garrulous man whom I liked right away, and we exchanged mutually incomprehensible pleasantries.

“It is English soap for your wife,” I explained as he sniffed the box I presented to him.

I gave him my second gift.

“The Cuban cigar is for you,” I said. “Both gifts are special.”

While Chinese politeness often assumes the shape of a gift, it doesn’t prevent the question of how much the gift cost its bearer.

“Are they expensive?” asked Mr. Han.

“Yes, very expensive,” I told him.