The Foremost Good Fortune (18 page)

The Cruelest Month

What happens next is I have to get through the rest of April in China. My breast tissue slides sit in paraffin wax in a pathology lab in western Beijing. I need those slides before we board the plane home. All month long, the head pathologist at the Chinese lab says he’s not going to release the slides to me.
It is not their custom
, is how Tony translates what the lab secretary tells him. In China the government has a policy of holding on to everyone’s tumor specimens. My breast tissue has become property of the CCCP.

“But they’re my wife’s,” I can hear Tony argue on the phone in English. “It’s her tissue. From her body.” One week before the flight and Tony switches to Chinese and begins speaking loudly. Our hope is to get the head of the hospital where I had the surgery to call in a favor. I need those slides. They’re going to tell the story of my cancer when they’re read by pathologists in the States. Meanwhile, I’m killing time in Beijing. I can’t concentrate on writing. What if the cancer has slipped into my bloodstream? Or is circulating in my lymphatic system? April is now also the longest month.

There’s not much Beijing TV that isn’t in Mandarin, and right now I need to be distracted from myself. We have six foreign channels at the apartment. Not bad for a country with no international television ten years ago. But after eight months of the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, I’d love something with a plot. I head out in the van with Lao Wu to an illegal DVD store. I get to a small, nondescript shopping plaza and see a hand-drawn sign: “Tom’s Shop.” I follow the arrow inside the glass door and take a steep set of spiral stairs that ends in a dank basement where a throng of people rub shoulders among thousands of pirated movies.

A Chinese man I know named Paul cherry-picks American films to air directly on Chinese television. Paul says it’s a difficult thing to navigate Chinese censorship. The rules are arbitrary. He told me once at dinner: “You can show boobs, but not nipples.” And you can show violence, loads of it, but not against the Chinese government. He says people in China believe concrete rules govern the censoring, and that these rules are written down somewhere. But he’s come to realize that the rules are always in a state of flux—like almost everything in this country—made up as the screeners go along.

I’m getting ready to pay for the second season of
Weeds
when one of the teenage girls stocking the shelves runs to the front door, slams it shut, and throws the dead bolt. We’re locked in, and from the jittery Mandarin around me it sounds like the police are about to make a raid. The Chinese woman behind the counter starts taking money and selling DVDs fast, then pointing with her hand to the back of the store. I get one huge shot of adrenaline. The police are coming, and they will arrest me and put me in a paddy wagon and take me to jail. I will not be able to speak enough Chinese to make a phone call. I will never see my children again. I won’t be able to have the mastectomy.

Why haven’t I studied my Chinese harder? I calm down enough to ask clearly, in English, if there is a back door to the store. Another one of the young girls leads me through the stockroom. It’s packed with illegal movies—thousands of them in black cases stacked against the wall and in heaps on the floor. I find a secret back staircase, where I run into a line of ten other people standing on steps that lead to a fake door that looks like a wall. I can hear the girl at the top asking quietly for someone on the other side to open up. I finally motion to her to bang on the door—I raise my fist in the air and smile. And so she does, and slowly the wall begins to slide to the side. We are let into an Impressionist art gallery, and from there we fan into the street.

I still have tinglings of the adrenaline when I walk into Jenny Lou’s next door to see if they’ve gotten a shipment of Honey Nut Cheerios. Sometimes they have them, sometimes they don’t. Aidan is obsessed with this cereal. It must be a reminder of home for him. Today there are three family-size boxes, and I carry them to the cash register and pay ten dollars for each. The stolen DVDs are a dollar apiece, but the cereal costs five times more than the average Chinese daily wage.

I head back to the minivan and ask Lao Wu if he knows the Chinese
word for kung fu. He has no idea what I’m talking about. I want to take the boys to see some kung fu, I say again in my best Mandarin. Finally, I make karate-style air chops, and he gets it right away. He lets out a small yell of recognition. “GONG fu,” he says. “Gong fu.” The highway is fast today; a whole line of cars is speeding in the breakdown lane as if we’re in a NASCAR race. Beeping seems to be the Chinese answer for an indication light.

Then the five lanes are pressed into two with no warning. Cars swerve to avoid hitting a teenage policeman who stands in the middle of the highway wearing a neon orange safety vest. He looks about fifteen and waves a white baton in the air hoping the cars in the road race will see him. I let out a little yell. “Bu keyi.”
Not okay
. Lao Wu agrees with me by nodding his head. It’s clear he can’t speak because the driving has gotten too intense. Cars cut us off and squeal. Up ahead, there’s another policeman, just as young as the first, and then another. Where are these boys’ mothers?

This is how the highway north of Beijing is cleared of three lanes of traffic for whole miles—by a string of human targets. Just then the first double-decker bus roars past our minivan. Then the second and the third. I begin to piece it together. Only the most important VIPs get the highway cleared for them, and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are meeting in Beijing this week. That’s them. Stewards of the world’s biggest Communist nation speeding by. Maybe I should ask Lao Wu to follow the buses so I can stage a protest. I want these leaders to pass a law allowing pathology labs to release breast tissue of expatriates. “Government?” I ask Lao Wu in English. He nods and tells me in Chinese that the leaders are driving to Tiananmen.

The next day there is good news: Lao Wu takes me to the Chinese lab, where he signs sheafs of forms in triplicate and waits for an orderly to give him my slides. I sit outside the hospital and nervously count the minutes it takes Lao Wu to walk back to the parking lot, open the passenger door, and hand me a box the size of a deck of cards wrapped in a paper towel. This after a month of wrangling.

We drive home to Park Avenue, and I carry the box up to the apartment with two hands—carefully, carefully, as if it’s a bird’s egg
that might break. I put the box in my top bureau drawer, then head back to the elevator. I need to buy milk and bread at the French grocery store before the boys get off the school bus. I run into a Chinese woman I know named Dawn in front of the baskets of oranges. We met on the playground last month, and Dawn told me she was born and raised in Ireland. Her parents emigrated there from China in the sixties simply because they wanted to. She said she’s known more discrimination in Beijing than she ever did in Ireland because she can’t speak Mandarin. Her English is laced with a beautiful Irish brogue.

She says her mother is in town now. They’ve just had a family portrait taken. This is when I have an out-of-body experience in the produce section and tell Dawn I’ve got breast cancer. I must need to unload, because I don’t know Dawn well enough for this. But here I am, bursting with news. Dawn’s advice:
Eat organic. Eat only organic
. She says,
You have to. And no stress. You can’t have any stress
. I nod my head and want to laugh. There’s one week left until my mastectomy and she thinks everything will be okay if I can just get my hands on some organic Chinese produce.

Tonight Britta brings us dinner. She and Hans and Tony and I sit at our dining table and try not to talk about cancer. She and Hans are from Germany by way of London and have been in China for two years. When I met Britta, my dating circle widened dramatically. She invited me to book clubs and brunches and craft fairs. She’s a milliner by trade and designs great hats for women all over the world.

Hans passes the plate of cheeses to me and asks Tony how he learned Chinese. “It’s a story of chance,” Tony says. “I stood in the hall of the language department at Stanford twenty-four years ago thinking I’d sign up for Japanese. There was a long line outside that office. Everyone wanted to learn Japanese then. A Chinese teacher offered me a cup of tea. There was no one in the Chinese line. When I left, I had registered for beginning Mandarin.”

Hans laughs. “I think knowing the language makes all the difference here.”

“It certainly helps.” Tony nods.

“And I believe,” Hans adds, taking a sip of red wine, “you’re either
outside the language or inside the language in China. What I mean is, you’re either in the conversation or not in it.” He stops and smiles. “So you are in.” He points at Tony. Then he looks over to Britta and me. “And we are out.”

I try to pay attention, but I can’t. What I want is for someone to tell me that the pain in my side is a bruised rib or perhaps a pulled muscle. I’m struggling. Britta and Hans are sincere. It’s good to have them here. I am so glad we met them. I don’t have to try to laugh with them. If the cancer has already changed me in any way, it’s that I’m more honest. This is a good thing. I can also now detect bullshit from a mile away.

In the morning, Sabrina and I take our four children horseback riding for the first time, deep into the dry forest north of Beijing. Lao Wu drives us forty-five minutes on the crowded highway until we near the airport, where I can see the planes coming down low. Then we veer off the road into the woods. Sabrina leans forward and tells me there’s some übersurgeon who “does breasts” at a Beijing public hospital, but you have to wait years to see him, unless you know someone who can grease the wheels. She asks me if I would like her to try to arrange an appointment with him. “No,” I say. “No thank you.”

Then she asks, “Are you feeling tired today?” I know this is the indirect Chinese way of saying she’s thinking about my cancer. I’m grateful. But I’m also afraid. I don’t want to have to trust my new friendships here. I’m worried that these women won’t meet me halfway. Or won’t be able to. Introducing cancer into new courtships is not very Jane Austen. I’m sure it’s frowned upon in etiquette books.

Sabrina wonders if I want to ride a horse and I shake my head. Three old men in black wool jackets sit by the side of the road smoking cigarettes. One blue dump truck full of wooden beams stops in the middle and forces us to drive around it. There are no other cars. I want to tell Sabrina that I’m certain cancer has infiltrated my bones. I could not be more serious. My left arm hurts, so I try not to move it. I don’t want to disturb tumors growing there. All this anxiety has given me a stomachache.

We come upon a couple of half-formed cinder-block foundations and then rows of poplar trees that line the banks of a slow green river. The land seems to have been untouched for centuries, even this close
to the capital. Tony would say I’m imagining things with my arm. Last night he called Dr. Specht, my wonderful surgeon back in the States, who said that under no circumstances would my small cancer be causing my arm to hurt and that what I was feeling was radial pain from the lumpectomies. Dr. Specht said, “Try to get her to sleep.”

Then we come upon the surprise of the Sheerwood horse farm—a sprawling compound of riding rings and aluminum barns with hundreds of stalls tucked in the forest like in a fairy tale. The children jump out of the van and run to try on riding helmets. Then they each climb up on a horse and spend an hour learning how to post, while I stand in the eighty-degree heat watching and feeling deranged. I try not to think about my cancer for minutes at a time. Sabrina comes and stands beside me and says, “Thorne is a natural on the horse. And look at Aidan. Look at how he talks to his pony.”

Thorne is on a gigantic black mare that holds her head high while he rides her in circles in the ring. He smiles and smiles and waves to me. Aidan is in the fenced-in ring on a white pony that bucks. But Aidan murmurs to him and shows him how to be friends. My mind is like a gerbil on an exercise wheel. It circles the cancer over and over. Can my children sense how tense I am? All I want to do is get to Boston and have the surgery. I’m not prepared for anything that might come after—not dying, or talking to my kids more about dying. I’m not prepared to feel mortal.

After the boys fall asleep that night, Tony and I try to watch an old James Bond movie on TV. It’s an odd thing to look at Sean Connery speaking Mandarin. I lean back on the couch, and Tony rubs my feet. Then I run my hand along my elbow and find a lump under the skin. It’s been there for years, but I turn to Tony and hold my arm out.

“Look,” I say. Proof of the cancer.

“It’s nothing, Sus,” he says calmly. “You’ve always had that bump. It’s from where your elbow rubs against the edge of the desk when you write.” Then he stands and puts his hand out to walk me to the bedroom. “Let’s go to sleep.” Tony’s love holds us up right now. But I miss my friends. I miss my family. It’s time to go home.

The plan is to take the boys out of school on Friday, eight weeks before the semester ends, and move in with my parents in Maine. We’ll
land there on a Wednesday and then two days later Tony and I will drive to Boston for my surgery. Who knows when we’ll come back to China? Or if we will. We have to pack as if we’re gone for good.

But before we go we need to orchestrate a series of good-byes—to Rose, to my yoga teacher, Mimi. To the boys’ school. We need to make this leave-taking feel within the realm of normal. I worry that pulling Thorne and Aidan from school is too big a disruption, but Julie, the school principal and also my friend, reminds me how resilient children are. She tells me the teachers are putting together a road packet for the time the boys will miss. She convinces me that Thorne and Aidan will love going home for summer early.

We finally arrive at the “day before we’re leaving China.” I didn’t think I’d reach it. There’s been this urgency following me. A dark feeling I can’t shake. At the bus stop in the morning, two of the Taiwanese moms give me farewell cards with short Bible verses inscribed in them. My friend Flora hugs me and says “I love you” into my ear. All along, there have been limits to these playground friendships. But Flora says “I love you,” and for just one moment I believe her. It’s one of those lost-in-translation moments; Flora does not really love me. She doesn’t even know me well. What I think she means to say is that she sends her love, or wishes me well. It’s freakishly warm—seventy-five degrees in April—but the desert wind is in our faces, and I notice that Flora and I are still wearing parkas to stay warm.