China Mountain Zhang Read online

  I follow him into his office and he sits down. I notice his jowls hang a little, like a tired bulldog’s. Then I stare at the wall in back of him.

  “Engineer Zhang,” he says in Mandarin, “Please you come to dinner on Sunday.”

  The wall is white and needs painting. “Thank you, Foreman Qian,” I say, “I would be honored.” And then slink out onto the site.

  Long terrible day, with Foreman Qian smiling at me as prospective son-in-law. The crew knows something is up, and with Foreman Qian lurking around the site, nothing gets done. I do not ever reprimand them directly, it is not the way to get them to work, instead I find small ways to express my displeasure. But my heart is not in it. At noon I lie in the sun on a sack of cement-it’s not comfortable but I only mean to sit a minute. I put my forearm over my eyes and fall asleep, jerk awake and drink more coffee. We finally finish at 4:00. As I pass out pay chits I look at each one, “Your hard-earned pay,” I say.

  I hear Kevin from Queens mutter, “Qian been bustin’ the bastard’s ass again.”

  Little do you know.

  Friday evening I sleep for about five hours and then meet Peter at 11:00 to drop in on a friend’s party. I fully intend to be home by two, three at the latest. When I get home it’s 8:00 in the morning and I sleep the day away. Saturday I promise myself I will stay home that evening, but I end up meeting a couple of guys for a vid. Sunday morning finds me, as always, tired, broke and with a flat that desperately needs cleaning. It’s not a big flat, it doesn’t take any time to straighten up, I just don’t get around to it for weeks on end.

  At 6:00 I present myself at apartment sixteen, in a complex on Bay Shore. I am carrying a carefully wrapped copy of Sun-zi’s classic on strategy. Not that I think Foreman Qian is such a fan of military strategy but because I think he will be flattered by the insinuation he reads the classics.

  Foreman Qian’s daughter answers the door, “You are Engineer Zhang?” she says. “I am Qian San-xiang.”

  She is astonishingly ugly. More than ugly, there is something wrong with the bones of her face.

  She is a flat-faced southern looking Chinese girl of twenty or twenty-two. She has a little square face like a monkey and small eyes even by Chinese standards. Her little wizened face is so unexpected I blink. I think instantly of some sort of bone defect that would create that almost non-existent chin. She looks at me expressionlessly and then drops her eyes and glances sideways at her mother. Her mother is a matronly looking woman clasping her hands together and smiling at me; Foreman Qian comes into the doorway to the little foyer and says hello and there we all are, four of us crowded into this little space. San-xiang slides between her mother and father and disappears into the next room.

  “Let me take your jacket,” her mother says. “I am Liu Su-ping.”

  Chinese woman do not take their husband’s names, and it is evident that I have left the West in the hall.

  I shrug out of my jacket and casually leave my package on the little table by the door. As a polite person I do not call attention to the gift, as polite people the Qians pretend not have noticed it. We go into the living room, full of heavy wooden furniture clearly brought over from China. The elaborately paned window faces the harbor. The apartment is pretty but extraordinarily cramped. I sit and am offered something to drink, which I decline.

  “No, please have something,” Liu Su-ping insists. She has small soft looking hands which she keeps clasped tightly together. I decline respectfully. Am I certain I would not like some tea?

  “San-xiang,” she calls, “bring Engineer Zhang some tea.”

  “No, do not bother yourself,” I say. I am not an engineer, I’m a construction tech. I hate when people call me an engineer.

  “It is sent by my sister, Dragon Well tea, from Huangzhou,” she says.

  Having politely declined three times I can now say yes, I would be pleased to have some tea. It is always easier to let people give you something than to convince them that you are not being polite, that you really just don’t want it.

  Now, however, while San-xiang makes tea, silence falls.

  “So,” I say in Mandarin, “I have always meant to ask you, Foreman Qian, where is your family from?” There is a little burst of conversation. His family is from Chengde, in the west. Her family is from Wenzhou, in the south. They met when he was on a two year assignment in her province. Where is my family from?

  I can only say I don’t know. Elder Zhang is born and raised in the States. I have a grandfather on the West Coast but I haven’t seen him in twenty years. And there is no need to discuss my mother so I don’t mention her.

  “You speak Mandarin very well,” Liu Su-ping says. “Where did you learn it?”

  “I went to the Brooklyn Middle School of Theory and History and all of our classes were in Mandarin,” I say, “but I am afraid I was not so quick as my classmates. My Mandarin is very poor.”

  Oh no, oh no, they say, it is very good, very smooth. Oh no, I say, they flatter me.

  We lapse into silence. My only consolation is that I must not be making a good impression.

  San-xiang brings in tea on a tray. The tea is served out of a pretty porcelain tea pot. It is nice tea, smokey and strong. I say so.

  San-xiang serves tea and sits down, eyes on her lap. She is dressed nicely but more casually than I expected. Foreman Qian is in tailored coveralls, he is dressed exactly as he is every day at work. But San-xiang and her mother are dressed in tunics with mandarin collars over tights, very casual. The clothes might even be from China. I am overdressed and conservative, wearing a long black shirt to mid-thigh, but I thought this would be more formal. It is too late to worry. I wish I was brave enough to do something truely rude.

  After a moment San-xiang gets up and goes back into the kitchen and returns with a plate full of peanuts, candied walnuts and ersatz quail eggs. I hate ersatz quail eggs, but I carefully taste everything.

  I am relieved that I have to get up early tomorrow, it will provide me with an excuse to leave early.

  Dinner progresses pretty much as the rest of the evening has, that is to say, laboriously. The food is good; pork stuffed with hard cooked eggs, dumplings, a fresh salad, and lastly soup. Foreman Qian and I talk business and in the course of the evening San-xiang says hardly anything to me. I keep waiting to hear her speak. Her voice, when she does speak, is high and soft, a little girl’s voice. I know she is in her early twenties. A very sheltered girl, I think.

  At nine I apologize and say I must be at work early the next day, I have a strict boss. Foreman Qian laughs. “It has been good to have you, we don’t have guests often.”

  I am not surprised, considering that they seem to have little social grace. “I have had a wonderful evening,” I lie.

  “I realize that you two have not had much chance to get to know each other,” Foreman Qian says. “Next you must spend some time together.”

  San-xiang glances sideways at her mother. I feel the color start to rise in my face. Why does his suggestion sound somehow illicit? Not sexual, but I feel compromised. “Yes,” I agree. “Perhaps next time we will have more chance to talk.”

  “Perhaps on Saturday, you two might take the time to get to know each other.”

  Lenin and Mao Zedong. But I beam like an idiot. “That would be very nice,” I say. “Saturday.”

  “Fine,” Foreman Qian says, “you decide what you should do. And I will see you tomorrow.”

  The door closes and I am standing in the hall. I stare at the closed door.

  Oh shit.

  “Perhaps,” I suggest to Foreman Qian, “your daughter would like to go to a vid with me.” This is a nasty comedy we play, one of Shakespeare’s problem comedies, like Measure for Measure. A tragedy that has lost it’s nerve and is trying desperately to pair principals who have no business with each other.

  He nods, he is doing accounts. After he has finished whatever he is writing he looks up at me. “I think you with her to kite race go. Often yo
u tell me you to kite race go. Hao buhao?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe kite race have no interest,” I say, falling into Chinglish.

  “This time, first time my daughter to kite race go. She tell me it have interest.”

  “Ah, good,” I say. “We to kite race will go.”

  I don’t want to take her to the kite races, they don’t start until 9:30 and if I took her to a vid I could take her at 7:30 and have her home by 11:30, midnight at the latest. If she’s as charming as she was at dinner it’s going to be a night that will feel like six months anyway.

  So Saturday I again present myself at Flat Sixteen at the building on Bay Shore. The door is opened by Liu Su-ping, San-xiang’s mother, and I am forced to make small talk while San-xiang finishes getting ready. She finally appears in tights and a long red jacket. She has nice taste in clothes but the night already has the same out-of-synch quality as all those times in Middle School when I took a girl out. At least now I am not hoping that something will arouse some sort of latent heterosexuality.

  We are told to have a good time and leave. She watches the floor, and then the numbers in the elevator. I resist the impulse to say, ‘Nice weather.’

  We walk towards the subway and suddenly she says in English, “I want to tell you I’m very sorry about this.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” I say brightly.

  She glances up at me, that same sidelong glance she gives her mother. “I know you didn’t plan to spend your Saturday night dragging me to the kite races. I know you are doing this because of my dad. You probably have a girlfriend.” The last with such bitterness I am taken aback, even as I find myself thinking her English is good.

  “No,” I answer honestly, “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Look, we’ll go to the kite races for awhile, then I’ll take a cab home and you can do whatever you want to do.”

  The world is unnaturally cruel to ugly girls. “Why don’t we just go to the kite races and not worry about it,” I say. “Have you ever been?”

  “No, I’ve only seen them on the vid.”

  “Well, they’re better when you’re there.”

  I pay her way into the subway and we head for Manhattan and get off at Union Square. We don’t talk on the subway but then the subway is loud. At Union Square we head for the Huang Tunnel pedestrian walkway and come up in Washington Square Park, where the race begins and ends. Washington Square is packed on Saturday night. I buy us a ticket for the stands because I’d much prefer to jack in. “Would you like something to drink? A beer?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “Don’t be polite,” I say, smiling, “I’m a New Yorker. I’m going to have a beer. Did you eat dinner?” She lets me buy her a beer and I get a bag of finger dumplings and find our seats. I even buy two programs, although usually I just use the board.

  We sit down, she holding her beer carefully. I watch for awhile but she doesn’t drink. Maybe she doesn’t like beer.

  “How old were you when you came to New York?” I ask.

  “Nine,” she says.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I hated it at first, but I guess it’s all right.” She shrugs, “Places are pretty much the same, underneath.”

  “Do you think?” I ask. “I’ve never been anywhere but New York, except once when I was six and we went to San Diego to see my grandparents. It seemed different.”

  “Things are different from place to place,” she says. ” New York is really very different from China, not as-” she pauses, diplomatically searching for the word.

  “We’re backward,” I supply, grinning.

  “Not backward,” she says. “Things are less advanced, maybe. I used to think I was unhappy because my father was in trouble and we had to come here, but now I don’t think it makes any difference. If you’re a certain kind of person, you’ll be unhappy wherever you are.”

  I have no doubt she considers herself that certain kind of person.

  “Are you happy?” she asks.

  “Do you mean at this moment, or with my life?”

  “With your life. Answer the first thing you think.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Do you think you would be happy in China?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, “I’ve never been to China.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  I wonder if she is playing a game. Does she know that her father has dangled China in front of me as her dowry? “Sure,” I make it sound as nonchalant as I can, “I wouldn’t mind going to China. I’d like to see China.”

  “Would you like to live there?”

  “Go to school there? Live there forever?” In China deviance is a capital offence, I don’t know about living in a country where my natural tendancies could see me end up with the traditional rememdy of a bullet in the back of the head.

  “It doesn’t make any difference if you did or you didn’t,” she says, “because you would still be you. And if you were unhappy here, you’d be unhappy there.”

  “But much of our unhappiness is caused by social conditions,” I say.

  “That’s naïve socialism,” with some disgust.

  Actually it’s evasive on my part. What started us on this conversation? Perhaps my expression gives away my unease.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was just trying to explain.”

  She is fascinating to look at. Her teeth are straight, her hair nice, her clothes lovely. But she has no delicacy of feature. Her nose is too broad, her lips are narrow, her forehead too low. And she has no chin. It is an amazingly simian face. I find myself drawn back again and again to studying her. Where did that face come from? Foreman Qian is not handsome, but his face is rounder. And her mother, Liu Su-ping, is no beauty, but she doesn’t seem to possess any of the features I find in her daughter’s face.

  “Why do you keep looking at me?” San-xiang says suddenly.

  Caught out, I look away. “I am out with you,” I say. “If you don’t like beer, I’ll drink yours. Would you like a soda?”

  “I like beer,” she says, and sips hers.

  She doesn’t like beer. I make some sort of small talk about kite racers, and everytime I glance at her she sips her beer. Lipstick bleeds at the lip of the cup. The flyers spiral lazily up, bright silks in red and blue. I show her how to place a bet, jack her into the system. “You have to bet on someone to be jacked in with them,” I explain. “But once you’ve jacked in, you can bet any additional way you want. Even against your flyer if you want. I usually jack into rookies because they’re less accustomed to racing and it’s more exciting.”

  She bites her lower lip in concentration. Above us the kites swing in a huge arc over the square and head into the darkness towards Union Square. The system cuts in and suddenly I’m in synch with a rookie flyer named Iceberg. I can feel his/my muscles pumping, I can see the kites ahead of me when we come into the lights over Union Square. The kites swing over Union Square and come back towards Washington Square, gearing up to begin the race when they cross Washington Square. My flyer is tense with anticipation. It’s not the same as really experiencing it yourself, everything is flattened, at a distance. I know he feels the cold, but I’m not cold. I open my eyes and see the silks above us.

  I glance at San-xiang. She is gazing up into the darkness and when the kites flash brilliant into the lights above Washington Square she shivers and takes a drink of her beer.

  I don’t know why it is so much more exciting to see the race live. Everybody jacks in at home, too. And at home the race is clearer than it is out here. But it is wonderful to see them up there and at the same time be able to close your eyes and see some sense of what they see.

  The race is quick-at two laps they always are-and Iceberg doesn’t finish in the money. “Ready for another beer?” I ask San-xiang.

  “Yes, please,” she says. She has color in her cheeks, whether from the race, the chill, or the beer I can’t tell.

  When I come back sh
e smiles up at me. “Thank you,” she accepts the beer. “This is fun. You do this a lot?”

  “Pretty much,” I say.

  “Would you like to be a kite racer?”

  “I’m too big,” I say, laughing. Kite racers are small, usually around 40, 45 kilos.

  “Yes, but wouldn’t you like to be? If you could?”

  “If I won a lot,” I say.

  She laughs and sips her beer, watching me over the rim of the glass. Flirting. We pour over the program, I haven’t heard of any of the fliers in this race but I recognize a lot of the racers in the last three races, the big ones. San-xiang decides not to bet on a rookie, she wants to win.

  She doesn’t win the second race, or the third, but her flier comes in second for the fourth race and pays 3:1. The credit light flashes and I take her up to pick up her chit. When she stands up she is a little unsteady on her feet from the beer. She refuses my arm but she’s delighted when they pay her off. She turns that monkey-face up at me and smiles.

  “I’m having a wonderful time,” she says, “one of the best times in my life!”

  We walk a bit rather than go back to our seats and the chill clears her head.

  “We won’t miss the next race, will we?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “There’s a break between the first four races and the last four. The first four are the minor card and the last four are the major card. The best fliers race the major card.”

  Peter and a guy from Bed-Stuy are standing where we always stand by the Arch. I hadn’t intended to walk that way, just habit. I think about pretending not to see them but decide what the hell and wave. Peter grins and waves back.

  “Who’s that?” San-xiang whispers.

  “A good friend of mine,” I say.

  We stop for a moment and talk to Peter and Bed-Stuy, whose name I can’t at this moment remember. “Peter, this is Qian San-xiang. My friend Peter and,” I make those motions one makes when one can’t remember a name.

  “Kai,” Bed-Stuy says.

  “Is that an American name?” San-xiang asks.

  “Scandanavian,” Bed-Stuy says, “But I’m American.” Peter and Bed-Stuy are both fair, both anglo-handsome. Neither one of them is very attractive by Chinese standards-big nosed for one thing and Kai in particular has the kind of angled face that Chinese don’t like. Chinese always think Westerner’s eyes are set too deep in their heads, that they look a bit Neanderthal. This is not a prejudice I share. But Peter and Kai are dressed well, both in sweaters with leather ties and shimmering reflective strips dangling off the shoulders and shaded glasses sitting on top of their hair. Bed-Stuy has his hair in a tail, like me. They look so bent I wonder if she will guess.