The Natural Laws of Good Luck (3 page)

Zhong-hua sat at my right and leaned toward me, attending to me as if I were a baby bird. He fed me by placing each delicacy on my plate and watching without ever making eye contact or smiling. Of the locusts and sea slugs, he gave me just a little and nodded once encouragingly to say, “Try.” He saw I loved shrimp and piled more on the plate. If I could not eat something for its strangeness, he would eat it himself off the plate. Out of necessity, the first new phrase I learned in China was
chi bao le
, “I am full.”

During our first evening together, we used a big red English-Chinese / Chinese-English dictionary to talk. While we sat across from each other, I on the hotel bed and he on a chair, our heads bent together over the fat book, I told him I was
yi shu jia
(an artist). He told me in English that his daughter was in middle school. He announced this carefully rehearsed phrase a dozen times, from which I inferred that, should I wish it, they would both become part of my life.

He said he liked to draw flowers, or rather, he drew a flower and said, “I love.” I said I would grow some for him. He said, “Thank you very much.” I said, “You are welcome.” Later I figured out that he always said “Thank you very much” when he had no idea what had been said. That evening the surplus of feeling spilled out as laughter over the edges of our small words. He forced out the English words with too much vigor of breath, and I deprived my Chinese words of oxygen and punch. It was fun for a while, until my body wanted to cave in under the strain of earnestness.

Little could jump from the fat book complete. We were both communicating mainly the sincerity of our effort. Suddenly, I felt an iron grip on my knee. I turned my face, but he was looking straight down at the open dictionary. I knew all his strength and ardor at that moment. Zhong-hua closed the fat dictator and set it on the floor.

After spending a few weeks together in China, we decided to get married. It could work, we knew it, and if we did not have official papers, Zhong-hua would not be able to come to America. Even this way, we would have to wait many months.

Zhong-hua called his sister's husband
Da Ge
(big brother). His sister, who had stayed home, he called
Da Jie
(big sister). Da Ge took us to the hospital for physicals and then to stark government offices to apply for marriage documents. The officials smiled big; they made long speeches assuring us that the Chinese government would not stand in the way of two people in love. They smugly
wished us long life, as if to say, “Look, if things go wrong, it's not our fault!” Da Ge talked to them and handed them an envelope of money, although we had already paid the fee. I looked at Zhong-hua, and he said, “Must be.” For a thousand years, bribery has been the grease of commerce and social interaction in China. Recent laws have made bribery grounds for imprisonment, but a person might invite equally serious disasters by not taking out this insurance.

There were other rituals over the next few days, following the ritual first feeding of the baby-bird bride. There was the ritual of washing each other. This spouse washing was done with great care and thoroughness in the shower. It was not an occasion for lusty overtures. Perhaps by middle age, experience had sobered us to the potentially harmful outcome of loving another. We didn't want to hurt each other. I was tentative and shy. I had been naked before, but this was the first time I actually felt naked.

There was no hiding from this man. Zhong-hua had flabby breasts and a hanging belly, which he guided my hand to scrub. Under the soft outer layers, I could feel the hardness of his body. His thighs were massive swells of muscle. All of this was rather surprising because the roomy business clothes and little black shoes he always wore disguised his powerful physique. Zhong-hua was rigorous and solemn scrubbing me. I had always been horribly self-conscious about my flat chest. I hated to disappoint him, but he didn't seem disappointed. He was meticulous and unsentimentally gentle. He said, “Yeah” and “Turn.” His sonorous voice was balm to my nerves. I turned and turned, breathing deeply. He dried my hair and passed the towel to me. He bent his head.

Before I went to China, I had banished expectations and moved beyond the amusement of imagining what my perfect person should be like. Expectations I didn't know I had would rear up much later, but in China I had none and so was allowed to see, feel, and appreciate with the extrasensory powers granted anyone whose critical mind is in suspension. I knew something about
Zhong-hua, not because of what his sister had told me but because he had been willing to open his heart to possibility. How awful it could be to reach halfway across the world to someone with whom you could find no rapport. That he also risked this disappointment assured me he intended to try his best and let me love him, sight unseen. We shared the implicit trust of mountain climbers, based solely on the certainty that the other will not purposely let you fall.

I am a mountain climber's daughter. My father's people came from Switzerland, so his mountains had craggy profiles, caped with fields of snow and skirted with slopes of scree. They required a strategy to reach the summit, and he knew how to make an inch on a map into many difficult steps by reverse magic. I learned that the mountain's head makes its own thoughtstorm, and wind and hail blow fiercest at the pass. I learned several unkosher methods of starting fire in the rain, but I never learned to plan my footsteps ahead of time or to employ a strategy. I had no strategy in China and yet, without ever knowing, had been prepared.

From my father, I had learned of the silences of men, silences whose sparse emissions of words burst like seminal flowers high in the air. Camping in a pup tent with him, to whom I did not complain when groundwater soaked the bottom of my sleeping bag, I sometimes felt lonely, but there was a lot of space in the silence, space that had its own slow-motion speech, its own eons of time. I was in my world, he was in his longer, dryer one, but we were together at the feet of great mountains.

In our hotel room, Zhong-hua ordered our few belongings. How quickly that random room became our world. We unpacked and hung up clothes, sat on the floor and stretched our backs, sat on the toilet or sat on the bed with our notebooks and pens. We ate snacks and brushed our teeth. In this wordless matrix, the objects around us shone with new importance and a kind of radiant energy. From every thing in the room two different names slipped off, and they carried on in an unlabeled democracy reflected in the big wall mirror. Stomach rumbles and farts made
perfectly articulated statements. The absence of words let things be themselves. I felt the air warm and tingling with companionship sheltered from discourse. I looked often at Zhong-hua's resolute profile but did not need to look.

Zhong-hua stood at the foot of the bed where I was reading.
“Anmo,”
he said, which meant “massage.” He gestured for me to roll over. I did. His hands were astonishingly warm and powerful. He massaged not the muscle but whatever was underneath and inside. He pressed intensely on certain points, such as the sole of my foot. A warm, liquid feeling spread from my stomach to my limbs. He pressed my knee, and my head cleared. He slapped and chopped and rolled as if preparing flour and water for dumpling dough. I was grunting “Ouch, ouch, uh, ugh, hey!” This was not exactly what the word
massage
referred to, but then again, maybe
anmo
did not exactly mean “massage.” When it was over, I staggered to my feet and said, “Holy crap.” Zhong-hua smiled, satisfied that he had revealed to me another hidden dimension of himself.

Over the next few days, Da Ge took his small group to visit some tourist sites. Zhong-hua and I went along, lagging behind the others. In the daylight, Zhong-hua seemed invisible. Others hardly noticed him. He did not project outward at all. On the bus, he sat immovable, usually with his eyes closed. He seemed to ignore everything around him unless directly spoken to. Then he politely nodded or laughed. That's all. If I sighed or yawned, he pressed my head into his lap. The lap was heavenly.

We visited the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and other grand remnants of power. Zhong-hua's face remained expressionless. Sometimes I asked him
“Ni xiang shenme?”
(What are you thinking?). He said,
“Bu xiang”
(Not thinking).

At night in the room, he held me. His heavy body felt luminous and lithe; it was a fluid body that emanated energy from every part. I felt bathed in affection and treasured beyond measure, but could not breathe very well. I had to punch out an airhole in the covers and lunge for it.

Da Ge was ten years older than Zhong-hua, and both had been sent away during the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976) to teach school and labor in the fields of small farm villages. Mao's Cultural Revolution attacked the four “old elements” of Chinese society: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. Schools were closed and students banded into Red Guard squads appointed to implement the attack. The repressed rage of powerlessness was unleashed into unspeakable acts of sadism. Thousands of intellectuals—including writers, artists, musicians, and teachers—were beaten to death. Countless others committed suicide or spent years in prison.

Da Ge had spent six years as a teacher in a one-room school. With no fuel through the long winter, he had warmed up the children with jumping jacks and Qigong exercises until their fingers and toes thawed and they could concentrate. Nobody had winter clothes, gloves, or warm shoes. There was almost nothing to eat.

Now, thirty years later, we walked the hardened dirt between the village huts. One of his former students lived in the old schoolhouse with his aged mother. The mother seemed made of dry sticks dressed in rags and was barefoot, grinning a toothless welcome. Her son was also barefoot, dressed in rags, and grinning, but his belly was round. The rural people now had food, if little else. In a shed there was a motorized press for extracting oil from soybeans, a process that Da Ge remembered being carried out by human donkeys leaning their bodies against a pole that turned the gears.

The former schoolhouse was a small brick square with no windows, a dirt floor, and a thatch roof. A sleeping platform with a straw mat occupied most of the space, and a low stove made of sheet metal held the corner. There was dry grass heaped on the floor for making fire. That was all. In front a few chickens pecked listlessly behind a fence made of short branches stuck in the ground to form a semicircle against the house. All the villagers lived in similar barren simplicity, except for the director, whose house was larger and had a poured concrete floor, a furnished
tearoom, a food-storage room with tall baskets and urns, a walled courtyard, and a fat pig.

We continued by train to Da Ge's hometown, Qufu, birthplace of Confucius. Not far away was Yi Mountain, one of many Taoist mountains riddled with caves. Temples remained on such mountains, but they were ghost temples. Legends of both shamanism and early Taoism speak of sages and mystics, often called “immortals,” who lived in harmony with nature, eating herbs and alchemical elixirs, until they were four hundred or even eight hundred years old, when they just disappeared into the landscape. Da Ge said one Taoist monk meditated for forty years in front of a rock, keeping warm with Qigong practice. When he died, his shadow image was imprinted on the rock.

During the Cultural Revolution, spiritual practices were banned, spiritual leaders imprisoned or killed, and devotees ordered to marry and return to secular life as farm or factory laborers. Perhaps some fled to their sacred mountains. This particular mountain was made of many huge egg-shaped boulders. The trees were lush and hung with mist. I recognized many of my familiars from home: pine and oak, maple and birch. Even the flowers hugging the ground resembled their blue and yellow relatives in upstate New York. Sometimes Zhong-hua nudged me and pointed. His nudges were heavier than would be acceptable in American culture, but I was beginning to appreciate that these were conjugal nudges. “Umm,” I said.

Sometimes I tapped his knee and pointed. His eyes found the spot of sunlight that had rolled under a rock or the tree making its way up the mountain like a bent old man. He nodded with a barely audible grunt. A grunt is a sound in Chinese that can mean “oh,” “yeah,” “so what?” “OK,” “thanks,” “very, very good,” “oh, really?” “I'll be there,” “I'll think about it,” “good-bye, then,” or “I'm disgusted.” In this case, though, it meant “perfect.”

Halfway up the mountain, a path dipped under the boughs of long-needled pine and into a cave. A tiny old woman guarded the
entrance. She ushered us inside to the dark circle of water brimming at the mouth of the spring. She handed Zhong-hua a wooden ladle and bade him drink. He drank greedily and passed the ladle to me. Pure water in China is precious. Candles burned on a small altar, and there were unlit sticks of incense in a bowl. Zhong-hua knelt before the altar and lowered his head to the soil. He lit incense and stuck it into the dirt. I knelt and lowered my head, paying my respects to the spirits of this place, whoever they were, and to the god of my husband. Using the Chinese
Fo
(Buddha), I asked if he followed Buddha. He said no, because when he grew up under the rule of Chairman Mao, people could not believe. I asked if we had just prayed to Buddha. He nodded. Just to make sure, I asked again. He shook his head rapidly, “No, no, no.”

We left and joined the main path climbing upward. Small boys from the village at the bottom of the mountain bounded behind us, laughing and shouting. Their eyes sparkled with glee. They warned us in Chinese, “You cannot get to the top unless you are willing to crawl on your belly!”

“Like a dog!”

“Yes, yes, like a dog!” They laughed uproariously. I had no problem crawling on my belly but had to leave Zhong-hua behind where the tunnel became narrower than his. He and two portly ladies on the tour named Alice and Myrtle turned back on two legs to wait for us. The small boys, Da Ge, and I continued. The top was a smooth stone forehead sticking up into the swirling mist. This mountain where legendary Taoist monks had lived clandestine lives protected by the mountain spirits was the one place in China where I felt at home. On top, taking gulps of wind for nourishment, I felt elated. I sat in a crease of the bald head so as not to be swept off the mountain into oblivion. After a while I missed the dirt below. When we came back through the tunnel, Zhong-hua was waiting.