The Cost of Hope (2 page)

I planned to skip the party that John Broder, the
Chicago Tribune
correspondent, is throwing. I must get this piece written! But I am worn out, lonely, and discouraged. I leave the yellow sheets in the typewriter and wander over, intending to stay for only a few minutes. John Broder is a witty, lively, guitar-playing bon vivant. His wife is beautiful and dark-haired with a wisp of an exotic accent—Israeli? Their party is an event.

The bow-tied man on the sofa across the room is wearing
horn-rimmed glasses. He looks a bit out of place, maybe even a bit out of time. He’s older than the others. Stouter. More formal.

When he motions me over, I settle in next to him and begin to tell him the subject of my troublesome story. His eyes light up. Sino-Soviet politics are his specialty, he says. In fact, he is here in Peking as a Fulbright scholar, on a one-year fellowship to China precisely to study the relations between China and the Soviet Union. We begin an intense conversation about the personal and professional hostilities between Mao and Stalin that had led to the countries’ rift in the 1950s. The terrible economic price China had paid for the split. The effect on world politics of the two rivals, and the change in balance of power when the United States opened its arms gingerly again to China. It is a masterful discussion. Just what I have been missing. Just what I need. I am not so much of a geek as to bring a notepad to the party, so I try to memorize as much as I can before, close to 3:00 a.m., I say good night and walk home alone. I live only two buildings over, inside the compound surrounded by soldiers. By the next morning I remember the substance of the talk but not the man’s name.

That afternoon I call our host. The Fulbright scholar? John is stumped. People just show up at his parties. He didn’t know half the people in the room. I make a few other calls, but no one seems to recall the proper middle-aged man with the owlish glasses and bow tie. Without a name to pin the observations on, I’m not comfortable writing the story, so I let it go and chalk it up as another disappointment.

A few months go by. I have almost forgotten about him in the press of work. Then, without warning, I spot him again at another staple of 1980s China social life—a bank reception. A big American bank is opening its office here. It has rented the courtyard of a lovely old prerevolutionary home. The space is filled with the usual assortment of businesspeople, journalists, and Chinese officials
in Mao jackets. There are drinks and hors d’oeuvres and endless speeches about friendship and cooperation. He is standing alone.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I say.

“I was going to call,” he answers. “I’ve been traveling.” This time, at a business occasion instead of a party, he automatically hands me his card, as I just as automatically hold out mine.

“Soybeans? I don’t understand. You said you were a Fulbright scholar. Studying Sino-Soviet relations.”

He shrugs. “You’re cute. You’re a journalist. I wanted to talk to you. Journalists are always working. How long would you have talked to me if I told you I was in soybeans? You wanted to talk about China and Russia, so I made up a person who could talk about China and Russia. I knew you’d find out sooner or later.”

Soybeans?

Made it up?

I stare at the card.

“You asshole!” I finally blurt out. “You could have gotten me fired!” I stamp away.

And that is how we met.

Years later, this becomes our signature story, a kind of stand-up routine for both of us. When our children are old enough, we tell them the story at least once a year.

At his funeral, I stand up and tell it alone.

I don’t see him again until about three months later, on February 2, 1984. It’s Chinese New Year, the first day of the Year of the
Rat. I spot him in a boarding lounge in Tokyo, both of us heading back to the city that by now has been renamed Beijing. I’m on my way back from my first home leave. He’s coming back from who knows where. He is in business class and doesn’t see me turning right into coach.

There aren’t more than a dozen people in the cavernous rear of the plane. All commerce and diplomatic work stops for the New Year holiday, and no sane tourist goes to frigid, polluted Beijing in February, which a colleague once described as like being stuck inside a vacuum cleaner bag inside a freezer. Exhausted from a full day of upright flying back from my leave in New York, I lie down across three seats and fall asleep.

When we arrive in Beijing at midnight, the airport is more dreary than usual. Even in broad daylight the Beijing airport is a depressing place, cold and barren and more like a military hangar than a modern commercial airport. Even at its bustling peak, there is no food. No publicly available phones. In those days before cellphones, once inside the airport, you were nearly cut off from the rest of the world.

Tonight, the baggage handlers sullenly fling the bags onto the wooden pallets. Eager to get home for the holiday, skinny pig-tailed girls wearing khaki green airport service uniforms scurry around flipping off light switches even before the plane is fully unloaded. I look around. The few people on the plane have been met by relatives, or by their work units, or by their drivers. My own driver is home with his family. I gave him the holiday off, thinking taxis would certainly be available. Tonight there are none. It is minus 14 degrees Celsius—not even 7 degrees Fahrenheit. There is an eighteen-mile-long deserted road fringed with linden trees between me and home.

Then I spot him over by a service desk, a telephone in his hand. He is a hefty man but even across the room he looks oddly puffed
up like Santa Claus, a navy greatcoat ballooning around him. He has found an airport telephone tucked inside a service desk. I give him points for that. Still, I feel a faint wave of contempt. Of course he is going to need me to help him translate. I am no expert, but I have quickly made myself functional in the language. Older American businessmen, in my experience, have not.

I start across the room to offer to help, when a sudden torrent of rapid-fire, colloquial Chinese bursts out of him. He speaks so fast I can’t understand anything he says. He hangs up the phone and turns to me.

“I live in a hotel,” he says. “I’ve asked the desk to send a car to get us.”

Us?

I see I really haven’t much of a choice. We are the only two passengers left in the airport, and the last of the lights are going out. As we wait for the car, I watch in amazement as he begins pulling videotapes out from every wrinkle in his clothing. He is smoking, talking, and unloading all at once. His outside pockets. Inside pockets. Pants pockets. Inside his bloused-out shirt. His front waistband. His rear waistband. Altogether he stacks more than twenty cassettes that he had just smuggled in.
The Quiet Man. All About Eve. Apocalypse Now. Lawrence of Arabia. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Maltese Falcon. Vertigo. The Big Sleep. Dr. Strange-love. Bonnie and Clyde. Top Hat
. They are all classics, and they aren’t illegal. It’s just that bored officials with no other entertainment have a habit of taking videos to check for subversive material and then “losing” them.

“I have more than five hundred movies in my apartment,” he boasts. “I tape them off TV in the U.S. and bring them in every trip.”

Despite his grin, it is clear that I was wrong in supposing that he hadn’t noticed me boarding. He is peevish.

“I tried to talk to you the whole plane ride home. I kept walking back and all I saw was your feet.”

“I was asleep.”

“I went back a whole bunch of times and all there was to talk to was Mel Searls.” Mel is the portly and kindly U.S. embassy commercial counselor. This is obviously my fault.

“I was asleep,” I repeat.

“I like Mel, but I can’t talk to him for five hours.”

“I WAS ASLEEP.” This guy is ticking me off.

“So now what’s going to happen is you’re going to come back to my place and we will watch a movie, have a drink, and eat some treats.”

Uh, I think, that is not even close to what is going to happen. I am going to go home to bed. Alone.

Jet lag is my only explanation for what comes next. It is 1:00 a.m. in Beijing, but my body thinks it is 1:00 p.m. in New York. On the drive home I confront the reality that back at my miserable apartment I will face at least six terrible hours in my empty cinder-block office/home standing on the balcony unable to sleep but unable to do much else either. So when the car pulls up to my door—the soldier waved us past when he saw the white faces inside—I drop my luggage in the apartment and rejoin him.

He lives down the road in the Jianguo Hotel, the first new hotel built in China since the 1950s. It is a joint venture modeled on a California Holiday Inn and it is a foreigners’ oasis, with new carpets, polite staff, a private supply of salad greens grown without benefit of human manure, and a small restaurant serving hamburgers. Journalists and diplomats live in compounds. Business-people live in hotels. He has scored the Jianguo, the only one of its kind in China.

He opens the door to his home, a seventeen-by-seventeen room downstairs with a few steps leading to another room the same size upstairs. It is a standard-issue Holiday Inn hotel room,
complete with a painting over the sofa of birches reflected in a pond. Except for one thing: It is stuffed like a warehouse from top to bottom. He opens the door to the downstairs half bath. It can no longer be used as a bath, as it is packed tight to the ceiling with labeled boxes. There are boxes reading “Videos: Classic”; “Videos: Japanese”; “Videos: Christmas”; “Videos: Film Noir/Detective/Crime.” He files away his latest stash. I see boxes of Christmas decorations and what appears to be a full-size artificial Christmas tree swathed in plastic. There are boxes labeled “Halloween” and “Fourth of July.” There is a flagpole and large American flag, a dart board, a badminton set. There are musical instruments. A banjo. A small tuba. There are boxes marked “cameras,” “darkroom equipment,” and “entomology.” I can see insect nets and tracing paper and huge aluminum-shrouded lights, the kind used in those days for lighting close-ups. There are games. Monopoly. Parcheesi. Backgammon. In the spare, featureless, empty landscape of Beijing, his room assaults my senses.

Upstairs, his bedroom can barely be called a bedroom. The standard-issue Holiday Inn king is the only bare spot. He has constructed bookshelves and packed them with books in, as far as I can tell, at least six languages. One whole set of shelves is devoted to cooking gear. A clearly unapproved hot plate. Saucepans. Frying pans. A Dutch oven. Whisks and slotted spoons, wooden spatulas and pancake turners. A waffle iron. Boxes and boxes of cake mix and canned fruit, cans of cinnamon and sugar and vanilla and cocoa powder and garlic salt. He also has a full set of barware, shot glasses and tumblers and martini glasses, a shaker, narrow-mouthed white-wine glasses and wide-bowled red-wine glasses, beer steins with handles, an ice bucket with tongs, and tall glasses for gin and tonic.

I pick a demure Drambuie from a shelf crammed with every form of wine, liquor, and liqueur imaginable—all in tiny, one-serving airline bottles. Clearly this is a man who does a lot of
flying. He pours out a dish of mixed nuts and one of cookies, both hand-carried in from home. “Treats!” he says. We settle in to watch
Tom Jones
.

By the end of the movie the sun is coming up. We have barely spoken. I try to make conversation but it is plain that there is a right way and a wrong way to watch movies with Mr. Foley. Total silence and concentration is the right way. Any kind of distracting small talk is the wrong way. I stand to go. He walks over and stands facing me. Here it comes, I think. Then he reaches past me and pulls a map of China from one of the shelves. He is suddenly all business, and talking rapidly.

“So here is what we are going to do.” It isn’t a question.

“There are seventeen cities we’re allowed to visit now. Over the next couple of years there will be more. If we start now, we can get to all of them by the time our tour is up. You’re probably here for what—two, three years? If I need to, I can extend my tour. So can you, I suppose, if we need to. There’s Kunming, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan …” He begins rattling off the names of Chinese cities.

“We’ll travel all over China together. We’ve got to start right away. We haven’t got that much time. You are going to be somebody. You’re going to need somebody to take care of you. We’ll see everything we can in China. Then we’ll get married in the Great Hall of the People—I think they are letting foreigners get married there now—but anyway, we can get married again back home, and then we’ll have a raft of kids. We have to get moving.”

Who is this guy? What is he saying? Did he just ask me to marry him? Oddly enough, it is his phrasing that strikes me first. A raft of kids? Who says “raft”? For that matter, who says “treats”? Who proposes to a woman he doesn’t know—who clearly is hostile to him—after one evening watching movies together? This guy is out of his mind. I thank him for the movie and the drink and leave, intending that this meeting be our last.

• • •

The next day, I find myself climbing Coal Hill with him. From the top of the hill, behind the Forbidden City, wrapped up against the razor wind, we can see down into the Imperial Palace and across the city. The next day, another movie. Then a tour around Tiananmen Square. Then dinner. Then a night in his room, then a night in mine. Soon he is writing his reports after midnight at my interpreter’s desk while I struggle to get a story through the balky telex machine. And I am setting up a portable typewriter on a TV table in his bedroom.

Why do I keep meeting with this man? At forty-four, he’s twelve years older than I am. He’s chubby. No, he’s overweight. He wears owl glasses and bow ties. He’s crazy. And we’re angry with each other almost twenty-four hours a day.

Probably the searing loneliness of our surroundings has something to do with it. I have been here only a little more than a year and the tension of the aloneness is already close to breaking me. It is a different kind of loneliness than I have ever experienced, a kind of black hole that pulls me down as if underwater and often ends in panic. He feels it too. He has been here for more than three years already, and he tells me about long nights sitting immobile on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, or pacing the room frantically, so fiercely lonely he believes he will go mad.