The Foremost Good Fortune (34 page)

When I was in college I lived with a boyfriend from Canada. When he graduated, he hung on in our Vermont town waiting for me to finish school. We were the couple who could never decide if we were meant to be together. We both wanted to be writers. One day I opened his journal while he was working as a sous-chef at the local inn. It was a deceitful thing to do. He always left it on the bedside table. Inside, he’d started a letter to a friend he’d been in a rock band with. It said, “I’m living with a girl who is too attached to the past.”

I read his words, and then I put the journal down like it was burning. What did it mean? To be attached to the past? I knew I was implicated. Somehow his sentence sounded like a code for something much worse than nostalgia. After I graduated, he and I packed our things and drove to Toronto. We talked about marriage. He was a funny, brilliant person. But I always carried his words in my head. And he was probably right. I
was
attached to the past. I didn’t know then how that would translate in my life. Or if it was really a bad thing in the end. I always wanted to tell him I’d read the letter. But I never did. And then we both married other people.

Sometimes, during my cancer treatment, Tony has served as the gatekeeper to my past. He’s always up for the next doctor’s visit, the next surgery. He sees no worth in revisiting history. He doesn’t like me to dwell on yesterday or the day before. This is a sticking point for us. Because sometimes I think the past holds clues. On certain bad days I can’t help myself—I relive the last few years or months, trying to detect a crack. Trying to deduce where the cancer might have crept in. Tony catches me in the act and says
What matters is that you’re healthy. Why all the looking back?

After dinner, Tony and I take another cab to The Hotel G, where the bar is retrofitted in raw slabs of concrete. There’s a speed-dating party going on. The Chinese organizer asks if we want to join. “Even though you are married,” she says in English, “you can just do it to meet people.”

So we find ourselves sidled up to the bar—surely the only married
couple there—with singles filling out white information sheets about themselves with small pencils. I would guess the male to female ratio is two to one. Lots of smokers. The average age is thirty. A man to my right is wearing something around his neck that looks like a cross between a tie and a scarf. There’s a DJ spinning vinyl near the far window, and the electronica he plays has a heavy backbeat, with fake clapping and a synthesizer that simulates the sounds of laser guns.

Tony and I order single-malt whiskeys—something to sip while we watch. Most of the men lean their backs against the bar. Many of the women wear black dresses. The blender does not stop whirring fruit-flavored drinks. A lot of the speed-daters get out their cell phones and pretend to be busy. A teenage Chinese boy wearing a lime green down parka walks into the bar and then walks out.

I think there might be a lot of lonely people in China. I’ve read that since parents no longer arrange the marriages, there’s a new restlessness in the country. People keep trickling into the bar. The staff rushes to take drink orders. There’s a Chinese man with a white teapot in front of him who has no one to talk to and keeps tapping the bar with his hand. The man with the scarf that looks like a tie approaches the bar and orders another beer. I can see green glitter sparkling on his face. The organizer runs over and tells us the dates will be in five-minute intervals. I want to sip my drink and watch, but Tony keeps egging me on.

“It will be fun,” he says. “One of those once-in-a-lifetime things. You can write about it. Do research.”

When I met Tony, I prepared for a life of triangulation: China, my husband, and me. But not tonight. It’s late now. Mao Ayi must be wondering. I’m tired and I want to go home.
I am already married
, I turn and say to my husband.
To you. I am married to you
.

When we get to the apartment, Mao Ayi is waiting on the couch. She’s had a busy night, she explains to Tony in Chinese. Both boys wanted
pai pai
. She says it took a long time to pai pai Aidan and then Thorne was mad because he’d been waiting for his pai pai.

“Pai pai” is what Mao Ayi calls patting the boys’ backs while she sings them songs in bed. She loves to do it. The boys have gotten wise to what a good thing they have going. Because Mao Ayi will do pai pai
until
you have fallen asleep. Which is a lot longer than my American version of pai pai.

The boys discussed it in the afternoon before Tony and I went out—who would get it first and for how long. Thorne was jealous because last time, it took Mao Ayi so long to pai pai Aidan that Thorne fell asleep waiting and never got his. Mao Ayi stands up from the couch and goes to the hall to put on her leather jacket. She wears a proud smile and tells us again how the boys were crying—
They were fighting
, she says in Chinese,
over which one would get the first pai pai
.

Chinese Basketball

It’s the first day of March again—a warm Wednesday afternoon in Beijing—and I wait for the bus with the Taiwanese moms, who’ve just returned from another one of their long karaoke lunches. Flora’s best friend, Judy, is there. She always has a smile for everyone. I ask her how her son is. “He is too short,” Judy says with a serious face. “He is just too short and it’s a big problem.”

I have to give Judy credit for her candor. No one I know in the States would say what Judy has just said. Judy herself is one of the shortest people I’ve met in China. She says she doesn’t understand why her son is so small and that she tells him every day to grow. “I get him to play basketball too. I think jumping will help him grow taller.”

Judy asks me if I want to get in on a bulk order of seaweed the Taiwanese moms are having shipped from the home country. “It’s the best seaweed in the world,” Judy says. “It has minerals and iron and calcium for growing bones.” I order two packages and am supposed to pay her when the shipment comes in.

When Thorne gets off the school bus, he looks to me like he’s of average height. I make a mental note to check on this soon. He announces that he is Villager Number Two in the school’s Robin Hood musical. Back at the apartment, I look in his notebooks until I find the play’s script and read it through. It turns out Villager Number Two has one line in the entire production. Count it. One. But Thorne’s upbeat about it. He’s the only second grader with a speaking part, and he has twelve songs to memorize, which means he walks through the apartment singing again. This time the songs are not patriotic, or sung out of some raw dislocation anxiety.
Robin. Robin Hood. Always doing
good. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor
. I think Thorne’s made it to the other side. Beijing is where he lives now. He’s more like himself here than ever before. Or maybe he’s changed into someone else entirely in China, someone he never would have become in Portland.

On Thursday I go to the school assembly because Thorne tells me he’s reading a poem onstage. When it’s time for the second graders, my son bounds up the three stairs to the microphone stand, where he recites a piece he’s written in homeroom called “Mother.” I had no idea this was coming. I wasn’t sure if Thorne even liked me anymore—I’d been distracted so much of last year, tired and spacey from the surgery and the treatment. Thorne’s poem has words in it like
loving
and
defending
and
awesome
. I sit frozen in my chair, tears leaking from my eyes, and I know this is one of the moments to pay attention to. They don’t come crystallized like this often.

All year long I’ve hoped Thorne knew how much he mattered. Every week I asked him—
Do you know how much?
Even when he said
Yeah, yeah
and smiled, I wanted a better answer. Wanted to tell him again, just in case there came a time when I wasn’t here to do it anymore.

Everyone claps when Thorne finishes his poem, but my cheering for him goes on much longer inside my head. It hasn’t stopped, really. My eight-year-old is still not too cool for school. Who knew we would make it this far away from the specter of cancer? And that we’d be more or less intact? Or that Thorne would read a poem onstage in China and take a bow with a wide smile on his face?

An hour later Aidan gets up onstage too. Except he’s wearing a shiny purple velour sweat suit the music teacher’s put him in, and he’s singing a Chinese song about an African crocodile. He has two maracas in his hands, and he shakes them to the beat. I’m crying again but it’s because I’m laughing so hard. Not
at him
. Aidan would never forgive me for that. I’m laughing at how much fun it is to see him up there, singing his lungs out. What Aidan has done in China is to make it his home. It took a long time. He was not easily convinced.

The other things Aidan has done in China are to get taller and to learn how to read. The impact of both of these on him can’t be understated: he’s almost as tall as his brother now, and no one in our
family owns the inside track on reading anymore. Aidan has friends here, too. Aidan likes deep connections—to mark his friends with an X and not let them go. He seems aware of the precariousness of it all. He likes to double-check. Just to be sure. When we got home after the concert today, there was a birthday invitation for him on my computer from his friend Liam. That party is Saturday. “There’s four days between now and then,” Aidan said, counting on his hand. “What if Liam changes his mind? Can he take back a party invitation once he’s mailed it?”

One of the things I do now is talk to other women who’ve had breast cancer. The hospital back in Boston has set up an international phone line for us to call in to. And what an amazing thing that is. I’m in touch with six other women my age who are finishing their treatment. Great, funny women. We have a weekly phone call, and a therapist joins us. Talking to these women helps defuse the fear. There’s so much to say. An entire new language opens up—there are words about the worry of it that I’ve been holding in. I say them into the phone, and they start to lose their power.

The other thing I do with my time is more yoga. I still have pain in my left shoulder and along my rib cage. I meet Mimi on Wednesday and she asks me to see if I can try not thinking for whole minutes at a time. She tells me to breathe instead of think—to let the front of my brain drop away until I feel myself settle into my body. I’ve been scared of my body since the surgeries, afraid of what I might find there. Mimi says, “Watch yourself relax while you stretch, and take joy in that.”

Joy in it? How did she know there would be any joy left? I see how I’ve been ruminating on the cancer—still guilty of trying to solve for it. I haven’t wanted to spend time with myself. I lie down on the mat and stare at the white ceiling and begin to be able to be thankful for what I still have. For my husband. My children. Even my health.

Today’s yoga class ends with thirty minutes of Sanskrit chanting. I’ve never chanted before, but it’s just another thing I try for the first time in China that feels out of my comfort zone. Mimi leads us in the chanting, and I can’t get over the easiness of her voice—how it hits the high notes and then comes back down to earth. Everyone keeps their eyes closed the whole time we chant, and the feeling is one of being
supported, propped up by the sound of so many other people’s voices in the room. I don’t feel so alone in China anymore.

After yoga I walk over to the Bookworm to listen in on a journalists’ roundtable talk, and I’m calm in the way that chanting for thirty minutes in Sanskrit in the lotus position for the first time can make you. The room is packed, and we all have pens out and little notepads on our laps. It’s just one week after the anniversary of last year’s Tibetan protests, so expectations in the audience are high.

One journalist starts by announcing that all forms of print journalism will be dead in twenty years. And isn’t that depressing. But we aren’t here to talk about that. We want to know what it’s like to stand on the front lines in China. We’re after
news
. We want the reporters to tell us if access will get better in China—if there’s a way to uncover, as one person asks, “the real truth here.” Which is another way of wondering how long this thing they call Communism will be around. I want that question answered in a hungry way.

How hard is it to cover a story in China? I want them to tell us that too. The
Los Angeles Times
reporter tells us that a
New York Times
reporter has just been released after being held for twenty hours in a room in Yunnan Province with no explanation. He’d been walking around Tibetan houses there looking for a protest story.

Then an American professor reminds us that in totalitarian regimes the people don’t trust their government, and the government doesn’t trust its own people. The one Chinese expert on the panel says the Communist Party puts up walls to keep information from getting out of China, but the Chinese people just put up higher ladders. “Western reporters need to hold China to the same standards they hold the rest of the world to. China wants the foreign press to be nice,” he explains. But, he reminds us, “News is usually bad, because bad news is news.” There are bright spots, he says, in China’s understanding of free press. “For example, during the Olympics, the Chinese government had to attend press conferences and answer hard questions. Unfortunately”—he pauses—“the questions were only about the weather.”

Caskets

Yesterday was May 14, the one-year anniversary of my mastectomy, and I got stuck in our elevator. Elevators have always set me on high alert. They make me think of caskets. When I rang the alarm bell, nothing happened. Then I pressed the call button and began what I would call a long, heated exchange with some teenage security guard, who kept screaming at me in Mandarin. I believe he was asking me where I was. I believe I was telling him that I was on the eighth floor.

I should have assumed nothing. That is always a better way to proceed in Beijing. Assume nothing will unfold as planned and then everything is slightly surprising and more pleasant than predicted. “Wo yao yi ge ren!”
I want someone
, is what I screamed. (It was the only thing I could think of in Mandarin to say.)
I want someone
.