The Cost of Hope (3 page)

Visitors nod sagely. Of course it is hard. There are no movies or bookstores or symphonies or bars. No cereal, or familiar shampoo, or drinkable tap water or Tampax. A handful of places serve what passes for Western food, but it is just familiar enough to spark loneliness, not satisfaction. Yes, the tourists say pityingly; they understand.

The truth is, they understand nothing. Nothing about the lack of creature comforts really matters. We can live without hamburgers. We can live without peanut butter or Special K or maple
syrup. We pack in treats for one another from our home leaves—chocolate, good coffee. And if we were addicted to Bloomingdale’s or Bergdorf’s—well, then we probably wouldn’t be here in the first place, would we?

No, what matters is the aloneness, an aloneness that extends to everything around us. During the Cultural Revolution the Party ordered the grass dug up, the wild birds hunted down and killed, and dogs and cats banned as pets. There are no colors or sounds or movements to distract us. Then there is the isolation. Shunning is a biblical punishment—isolate the sinners, ignore them, refuse them eye contact and conversation. The shunned call it torture. Here, an entire nation shuns us.

A request for directions on the street is met with a frightened stare and silence. Many of us are surreptitiously followed to see whom we meet. The few of us who have managed to make Chinese friends wrap ourselves in scarves and hats and venture out to prearranged locations only after dark. Much later, an embassy official will tell me that Beijing is far lonelier and more alienating than even her Peace Corps assignment was in an African village an hour’s walk from the nearest town. Where she lived in Africa, she says, there was a gentle human contact that is almost totally missing in Beijing in 1984.

For centuries China has perfected the art of a formalized courtesy that keeps outsiders at bay. Casual visitors to Beijing come away charmed by the hospitality, the toasts, the speeches, the food. What few realize is that their second banquet will be identical to their first. And that the third and fourth will be the same as the opening two. And that the second month will have the identical scripted human contact as the first. The scripts are so well understood, and the fear of deviating from them so strong, that by my sixth month I can pass for fluent in Chinese. Anyone sitting next to me at a banquet would assume that I am a relaxed and confident conversationalist, when in reality I have simply memorized a
dozen call-and-response tropes. How long have you been here? A year. Are you used to it? Oh yes, at first I was lonely, but now I am used to it. Do you like Chinese food? Yes, I do, I love Chinese food. China is a big country, with many people. Yes, indeed. That is true. China is very big. Do you have children? No, I don’t. And you? A boy? Congratulations. A girl? Well, girls are good too.

When we leave our guarded compounds, we must walk fast, for otherwise a crowd will form. A silent, staring circle surrounds us whenever we pause. The bolder will reach out to touch. But mostly they just look. We feel like exotic beasts caged by curiosity in a very large zoo.

I respond to this by becoming smaller, retreating more and more into myself, curling inward into a small package. Terence is the opposite. He hurls his loneliness and frustration outward. He becomes as big as a volcano and every bit as unpredictable. Surrounded by a crowd on a particularly down day, I begin to cry. He, instead, takes a swing at the nearest gawker, a stopped cyclist, who saddles up and takes off in terror, pedaling as fast as he can go. At dinners and gatherings around town we routinely lament the conditions of our captivity. The rooms or apartments in which we are confined cost our employers fifty thousand dollars a year or more. There are two price tags for everything in China. One for the residents, another, ten times or more higher, for foreigners. Most of us grouse. Terence shouts.

“They are thieves! Lying, stealing thieves. All it is for them is gouge, gouge, gouge. How much can they gouge from the stupid foreigners? Lie! Lie! Lie! Gouge! Gouge! Gouge!”

He embarrasses and frightens me. I shout back.

“This is their culture. They are poor. We are rich. They just want to get as much as they can to improve their lives. You are such a bigot!”

“Since when is it bigoted to not like being gouged?” He gives no quarter. “They’re thieves.”

Others keep their complaints within the walls of diplomatic compounds and private conversations, smiling politely and toasting when outside. Not Terence. Every encounter is an opportunity for loud expression of his views.

When he decides that I cannot be a proper foreign correspondent without a trench coat he takes matters into his own hands. He brings a bolt of khaki material back to Beijing from one of his trips to the United States. He hustles me over to the Youyi Shangdian—the special Friendship Store where only foreigners are allowed to buy, and only with hard currency. Inside, a tiny tailor shop will make up clothes to order. He designs the Bogey-style coat himself, with a stand-up collar, a big leather buckle, and pockets for jamming my hands into. We are there for our first fitting. The model the tailor has produced is sloppily constructed and looks nothing like what Terence has drawn.

“You guys wonder why you’re a third-world country? There’s no excuse for this. Everything you do is half-assed and then you charge top dollar.” His voice is crescendoing as he shouts down the woman behind the counter.

“What does this look like? What does this look like?” His Chinese is perfectly pitched.

She stands silent before the torrent.

“Does this look like what I gave you?” His face is red. His shouting is beginning to attract attention. I am embarrassed.

“I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU!” he roars. “ALL OF YOU. I HATE YOU!”

WO HEN HEN NIMEN!

The guttural “h” and the sharply dropping fourth tone of the second
“hen”
—hate—make the outburst particularly effective.

I want to run. I want to hit him. I want to hide.

Somehow, however, everybody but me seems to figure Terence out.

A manager emerges from behind the curtain.

“What’s going on?” he asks the clerk.

“He’s mad at us again,” she says.

“Oh,” says the manager and turns back to his work.

Terence Bryan Foley.

Who is this strange man anyway?

Is he a spy?

His combination of nonstop revelation and a kind of hazy secrecy makes it very hard to answer that—or any other—question about him. I worry constantly that he is some kind of agent. For one thing, everyone I know thinks he is. For another, he will never answer the question consistently. Sometimes, he hoots with derision and mocks the questioners. “I’m a graduate of an Ivy League school. I was educated in New York,” he says—Columbia University, it turns out. “I dress nicely and I speak fluent Chinese—none of your snobby East Coast journalist buddies can believe that I’m really from the Midwest and working for farmers. Soybeans? C’mon. Get REAL. The guy’s GOTTA be a spy!”

Sometimes he simply sounds like the kind of moron who likes to tell half-truths to impress his girlfriend. “The CIA? Well, I’m not really
on the books
 …”

Over the months I learn that he was born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was raised there, the fourth-generation son of a long line of German farmers and Irish immigrants. He had been trying to get to China all his life. Most improbably, he has been pursuing the romantic ideals of Song and Tang dynasty poets ever since he was a little boy. The pastor of the church Terence attended as a child had been raised in prerevolutionary China by his missionary parents. In 1952—the year I was born, in fact—he gave the twelve-year-old Terence a book of Chinese characters, and Terence was hooked. Terence began to study Chinese on his own, picking out the characters one by one. Later he enraged his parents
by dropping out of Ohio State University and, without telling them, enlisting in the navy, where he trained as a Chinese language specialist. After he left the military, he finished his Chinese studies—picking up Japanese along the way—in New York. Now he reads Li Po and Du Fu in the original, a feat much like a Chinese speaker mastering Shakespeare and
Beowulf
.

His head is filled with plum blossoms and mists. He can recite lines about the longing for a faraway home and about the conflicts between honor and ambition. His mental China is made up of shadowy scholars in long silken robes sitting under willow trees steeping themselves in wine and poetic meter.

He has spent his entire adult life trying to reach this China of his imagination, a place of delicacy and sophistication, erudition and honor and dignity. The post-Mao China of squalor and spitting and secrecy, poverty, public executions, venality, and suspicion is almost more than his soul can bear. His fury at the Chinese of today, it appears, stems at least partly from their failure to be the Chinese of his imagination.

He is a fastidious dresser, in a style right out of
The Philadelphia Story:
charcoal suits, often three-piece; bow ties, as I saw that first day; felt hats; carefully polished black wingtips. He is disdainful of anyone, including me, who is not careful about his or her appearance.

During the years when China was locked up tight to outsiders, he worked with other countries. He spent years traveling around the world, helping states market their dairy products and grains, canned goods and fruits abroad. Then Terence saw his break when Nixon visited China in 1972. Terence immediately sensed that China was about to open to the West and shrewdly guessed that agriculture would be the first field to begin to develop. He began his preparations on the spot. He taught himself swine nutrition and poultry feed formulation and the Chinese vocabulary
to go along with it. He knew that China would want to learn modern agricultural techniques and that America would want to sell its products. He looked around for the most likely candidate and found it in soybeans. China was a huge consumer of soybeans; America a huge producer. With nothing more than his self-education and self-confidence, he wormed his way into a job with the American Soybean Association. U.S. soybean producers, he figured, would be among the earliest groups into China. He was right. In 1980, he became one of only a handful of foreigners allowed to live in Beijing as he opened the association’s office.

When he talks about his work for the association, he is dead serious. He visits farms. He talks with farmers. He finds American experts at extension schools and brings them to China to teach the Chinese how to use soybeans to fatten their pigs, raise more chickens, farm fish, bottle soymilk.

Yet still I worry that all this is a cover for something darker. The worst times come when he senses I really need to know. Sometimes I grow nearly frantic. “Terence, I’m a journalist. If I’m hanging around with a spy, I could be in big trouble. You have to tell me …”

“I can’t talk about that,” he says, with an exaggerated deadpan air of mystery.

Eventually I conclude he is simply trying to annoy me.

One night at a fancy party at the British embassy, he wins a raffle. As he walks up to collect his prize, a free weekend in Hong Kong, some unknown voice behind me shouts: “Spook!” It sets my rage off anew. When he returns to the table full of plans for our newly acquired upcoming vacation, I refuse to speak to him.

We fight constantly. We fight from the moment we meet. We fight over meals. We fight in the car. We fight in the shower. We fight in
bed. We trail each other down the street, each of us desperate to lose the other but more desperate not to lose the argument. We are blunt. We are not kind.

“You’re not going out looking like that,” he says. “You look like a bag lady.” Me: “Only dorks wear bow ties.” He thinks a friend who goes to work for a tobacco company must be banned from our lives; I think expressing disapproval is sufficient. I think my acquaintances are catholic and eclectic. He thinks I consort too readily with jerks. Edna St. Vincent Millay is a feminist genius. “She’s a castrating bitch,” he says. I think he gets worked up over nothing. He thinks journalists believe in nothing. I mock his speech—fireplug (It’s a hydrant!). UM-brella. He mocks mine—coo-pon (Everyone knows it’s kyoo-pon!). Roooo-f instead of ruh-f.

At Thanksgiving, I pull out a precious yellow cardboard box of Bell’s Seasoning. I am pleased with myself. I have had the forethought to pack it with my incoming supplies. The smell of the ground thyme and sage, and the early morning toasting of the bread for stuffing is, for me, Thanksgiving and Christmas and home. We are going to stuff a scrawny chicken and pretend it is a turkey.

“You’re not putting that chemical shit in my bird,” he says.

MY bird? MY bird? Since when is it HIS bird? He has insulted me and attacked my childhood traditions. I, it turns out, have assaulted his sense of elegance. Stuffing is called “dressing” and it is created in a different manner every year. Prunes. Apricots (which he pronounces AY-pricots, not the proper AH-pricots). Almonds. Oysters. Ground sausage, or simmered giblets. And by the way, while it’s proper to eat turkey at Thanksgiving—that’s traditional—NO ONE eats turkey at Christmas. The correct Christmas meal is either a goose or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Bell’s Seasoning plays no role in any of these holiday imaginings.

“We’re not using this garbage,” he says.

I snatch up the box, throw it at his head, and stomp out. I spend the next hour smoking and sulking on the street, while the usual curious crowd forms around me.

In truth, the reality of life in China has everyone on edge. For journalists every interview is a tedious ballet staged in meeting rooms with dozens of people arrayed in fat armchairs pushed back against the walls. Paying every bill takes an hour or more, carrying a wad of cash to a crowded office, standing in one line to pay, one to get a ticket for having paid, and back to the original line for the actual receipt. Phone connections are distant and tinny and cut off abruptly more often than they work.

The soybean association that Terence is working for is a government contractor that must meticulously account for every second of the day and every penny spent; I am working for a woman of temperament and ambition in whose eyes I can seemingly do nothing right. Yet she herself knows little about China and often makes absurd demands in the middle of the night. Her ignorance and impetuousness infuriate Terence. He rails on my behalf at stupid bosses all over the world.