China Mountain Zhang Read online

  We are carefully low key, talk a little about who is expected to win the seventh and eighth races, and then I say that San-xiang and I have to get back to our seats.

  “We’re going out to Commemorative afterwards,” Peter says. “Drop by if it’s not too late.”

  “Okay,” I say and head us back to the stands.

  “What is Commemorative?” San-xiang asks.

  “It’s a flyer bar that Peter likes,” I say. “Do you want another beer?”

  I buy two more beers and we make our way back to our seats. We pour over the program and talk about who to bet on. I’m tired and want to go home, but San-xiang is clearly enjoying the evening so I feign interest. She sips her beer and looks coyly at me out of the corners of her eyes and not knowing how to respond I pretend not to notice. Clearly she does not think I am gay and that is a relief but the night is beginning to depress me.

  “Your friends are handsome,” she says.

  “Do you think so?” I ask. “You da bizi,” I say. ‘They have big noses.’ The Chinese slang for westerener is ‘big nose.’

  She giggles and looks down at the program.

  Finally the last four races start. It’s a so-so card, the seventh race looks good. I pick a flyer at random in the fifth race, San-xiang deliberates before picking the odds-on favorite. I find myself watching for Peter and Bed-Stuy between races. San-xiang is disappointed when her flyer doesn’t come in. She wins the sixth race and is so excited she spills her beer. With some trepidation I buy her another, she has had two and a half and it is obvious that she’s not accustomed to them. But I am hoping that if she has another she will be drunk and sleepy enough to want to go home after the races.

  I finally pick a flyer who places in the eighth race. San-xiang is giggly and unsteady.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask.

  “What about that place your friends are going, Commemerative, do they have food?”

  “Not this late,” I say. “I know a little Thai place on West 4th Street, it’s not far from here.”

  “I am having such a good time, I want to stay out all night!” she says. “Are you having a good time?”

  “Of course,” I say. “When you go with someone who’s never seen the kite races it reminds you of your first time.”

  “It’s so exciting. It’s so much better than watching it on the vid.”

  This is a night she will remember all her life, the night when she went to the kite races. How many nights do I remember? How many special nights have I had in my life? Is it so much to give up a night?

  “Let’s get something to eat and then see how late it is, maybe stop in for a drink,” I say. She smiles up at me. Oh, the dangers of pity.

  The restaurant is crowded and we pick up our orders of curry and noodles and eat standing on the street. The streets are full of students in outrageous clothes. San-xiang watches a girl in a lavender tunic with no sides, belted at the middle. Underneath she wears a pale green transparent body suit. She is arguing with a boy, shaking her copper hair to make her points. The boy-as drab as she is vivid-is in one of those gray diaper things like they wear in India. He has long, impossibly skinny black clad legs sticking out of his dhoti. I wonder what he would look like if he didn’t rat his hair. ‘Leave her,’ I urge him silently. He is angry and sullen, regarding her out of hot bruised eyes. He crosses his arms and shifts his weight from one leg to the other. He is so thin that there is nothing under his skin but long, striated muscle, and the muscles are clear as diagrams over his face bones. Suddenly he turns and walks off.

  The girl flips him the finger and stands, rigid with anger, before whirling and walking up the street.

  “Dog,” San-xiang whispers in Chinese. She looks up at me for collaboration and I nod, although I know she means the boy. San-xiang takes my arm and I tense, startled, but she doesn’t notice.

  Commemorative is crowded and loud. Hot and noisy. I try to see Peter and Bed-Stuy but can’t, so I take her hand and force my way through the crowd. I finally find them near the back, at the end of the bar. They’re talking with a flyer, he only comes to Peter’s shoulder, and he’s dark and ugly. Not many flyers are pretty, like most of them he looks as if his head is too big for his body.

  “Zhang!” Peter shouts, “This is-!”

  I miss the name in the noise but nod and smile anyway. I don’t share Peter’s preoccupation with flyers. He says they’re atheletes, good in bed. I signal the bartender ‘two beers’ and she puts them up on the bar. Peter hands them to me, we can’t get close. Peter is happy and animated, trying to converse with his flyer. Bed-Stuy has the patient look of a man who has stood at a lot of bars and is willing to wait to see if his luck changes. San-xiang seems a little overwhelmed.

  I smile at her and shrug to show my apology. She smiles and drinks some of her beer.

  I watch her drink her beer, and she watches me. Then she turns pink and looks down at her glass. How fascinating she is. I can’t help looking at her, trying to define just what went wrong. What would she need to become beautiful? Larger eyes? More bone in the jawline? And why hasn’t she done it?

  We don’t stay long, it’s too loud. She is a bit unsteady when we leave.

  “Are you all right?” I ask her.

  She leans against me and whispers conspiratorially, “I’m a little drunk.” Her body language, her gestures, are all the actions of a girl being cute, of a flirt, and yet looking up at me is that square monkey face, those tiny porcine eyes. She wrinkles her nose and her eyes almost disappear, and I gaze, entranced by the grotesque.

  It feels lewd. All my life I have been careful not to stare. I don’t stare at war veterans, I don’t stare at street people. I guess, unconciously, I don’t stare at people who are ugly, either. But I can stare at San-xiang. I have the sudden urge to kiss her on the forehead, I don’t know why.

  We take the subway to Brooklyn and walk to her parent’s apartment. In the hall we stop and I think of being in middle school and bringing the girl to her door and trying to decide if I was supposed to kiss her or not. I kiss San-xiang, a nice brotherly kiss.

  “I had a wonderful time,” she says and gives me a trembling smile. “You are very nice.”

  “So are you,” I say.

  “Why don’t you have a girlfriend? You’re very handsome.”

  I like to be told I’m handsome as much as anyone does but coming from San-xiang it is a bit disconcerting. I make the Nali-nali, the don’t-talk-about-it motion with my hand, looking away embarrassed. “No reason,” I say. “I just don’t really want a girlfriend right now, I guess.” The walls in the hallway are China red.

  She rubs the back of her hand across her eyes and her voice is full of tears when she says, “I have to go, goodnight.”

  She unlocks the door and closes it behind her and I am left standing in the hall, wondering, what did I do?

  I do not expect her voice when I answer the call. It is Tuesday evening and I’ve only been home from work for a few minutes.

  “Zhong Shan?” she says, “It’s San-xiang.” We make inconsequential small-talk, how is work? I ask her how her work is and realize that I don’t even know what she does.

  “Some friends of mine and I,” she says, “on Thursday nights, we have, well, it’s kind of a political study meeting but it’s really not, we sit around and talk, mostly. I was wondering if you would like to come? It won’t be late, I mean, I know you work on Friday, we all do, so it… it won’t be late. But if you’re busy, I’ll understand. I mean, this is short notice and I know you probably have plans, or, really that you might have plans. That’s what I meant, that you’re probably a fairly busy person, and it might not be convenient.”

  She is so nervous, I want to save her. “No,” I say, “I don’t have plans. I’m not very political though. I’m pretty dumb about politics.”

  “But you went to the Middle School for Political Theory, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but that was ten years ago, and we didn’t learn to
o much about politics. Mostly we studied Mandarin.”

  “Oh,” she says in her high, voice. “It doesn’t really matter, we just mostly talk, anyway.”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “About 6:30,” she says and tells me where to come. I usually start at 7:00 a.m. and get off about 4:30 in the afternoon so that gives me time to get home and change. But Thursday comes and the project we are working on includes a side wall that will eventually have an artificial water-wall and a courtyard for the public. The wall is to be done in a continuous pour and for all the usual reasons we are late beginning the pour. Of course a special crew does the pour but I have to be there until it’s finished to secure the site.

  At six I head for Brooklyn, still in coveralls and workboots. The proletariat. Well, that ought to go over big in San-xiang’s political study group.

  I am late, it is quarter of seven when I get to the address San-xiang has given me. I need a shower and a beer, not necessarily in that order. The door opens and I say, “Excuse me, I am a friend of San-xiang?”

  The face in the doorway is Chinese. A man, about my age. “Come in,” he says, “we were afraid you got lost.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I had to work late.”

  There are five people in the little main room of this apartment, including San-xiang, whose eyes almost disappear in her delight.

  “So you are the man with the incredible name,” drawls a tall woman, not Chinese.

  I smile and nod. “One cannot choose one’s parents,” I say. Oh my foolish mother. Zhong Shan is the name of a famous Chinese revolutionary, the first president of the Republic; it is the Mandarin version of the Cantonese name Sun Yat-sen. To be named Zhang Zhong Shan is like being named George Washington Jones. I sit down next to San-xiang and she introduces me around. I catch only two names, the woman is Ginny and the ABC who met me at the door is Gu Zhongyan. There is also a couple, clearly married, in their forties, I think.

  I apologize again for coming late, and for coming straight from work without a chance to clean up.

  “We hope to eventually establish a neighborhood association or a commune,” Gu Zhongyan explains, “but we are none of us financially able yet. So for now we have a study group.”

  The male half of the couple passes out flimsies of an article out of a magazine. It’s political theory. I read through the first couple of paragraphs and don’t much understand, it’s something about optimum community size. San-xiang studies hers carefully for a moment, then puts it in a folder and pulls out another stack of flimsies carefully underlined and highlighted. She has made notes to herself in Chinese along the margins. Her characters are tiny swift swirls of line.

  They talk for awhile about the article. Ginny and Gu appear not to have read it as carefully. The male half of the couple is clearly the most committed. I gather in the course of the conversation that he and his wife lived in a commune before but there was some trouble and they left.

  The only commune I am familiar with is Peter’s, which has no ideology and exists merely as a tenant’s association to keep his building running. And doesn’t seem to do that too terribly well. I’m tired, it’s been a long day, and they talk carefully about the relationship between competition and productivity.

  I feel inadequate. I know that politics is important I just don’t like to think about it. I don’t know what my opinions are, I just know that very little I hear ever seems to have much to do with me, or with my life.

  This apartment is the apartment of a serious person. Disordered, but in a serious way-a large system on the wall, equipped for information and music, but no vid. There are flimsies in a stack on the floor, obviously down-loaded. The wall at the back has homemade bookshelves filled with books and stacks of flimsies in binders. The books look like non-fiction. I used to read a lot during my alienated adolescence. Fiction. There is a book lying on the floor near Gu’s chair, The Social Matrix: Religious Communities in Capitalist America.

  San-xiang talks. She is serious and involved. “A community doesn’t have to be autonomous to be a community,” she says. “People can work outside the community.”

  “Then what makes it a community?” Gu Zhongyan asks, sounding irritated.

  “A community is a group of people united by shared interests,” San-xiang says. “It can be work, or family or even something like a theater. That’s why a community should do something, have a product that everybody works with, because the profit and loss unites people.”

  “But there you have competition,” says the husband, “and whenever you have competition you’re going to have inequality. Some members are going to be less able to contribute.”

  “So the community adapts,” San-xiang says. “It adjusts. We’re adults, we can recognize that someone taking care of a new baby has less time, or that someone else isn’t going to be able to handle bookkeeping.”

  “But if you have competition,” says the wife, “people’s judgments become clouded. You get resentment. You can’t expect people to recognize and adjust, somebody is going to feel put out.” She sounds wistful, as if she speaks from experience.

  “Sometimes a community doesn’t adjust,” San-xiang says, “and sometimes it doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

  After the discussion we have green tea and cookies and then San-xiang and I walk to the subway.

  “What did you think?” San-xiang asks.

  “I think you are very smart,” I answer.

  She frowns. “No, I mean are you interested?”

  “In joining your commune? I don’t know.”

  “We don’t even have a commune yet,” she says. “You didn’t say very much, I guess it isn’t as exciting as kite races.”

  “I’m not a very political person,” I say by way of apology.

  She looks at me sharply but doesn’t say anything.

  “It’s true,” I say, “I don’t even like to watch the news. I’m not the kind of person who gets involved in political things.”

  “Everybody is involved in politics,” she says.

  “Not me,” I say. “Not because I think they’re bad, I think I should be involved, I’m just lazy.”

  “No, listen to me. Everyone is political. You can’t help it. You make political decisions all the time, just as you make moral ones.”

  I shrug.

  “Zhong Shan,” she says gently, “get this through that handsome empty skull of yours, okay? No one can escape politics. You’re ABC, are you a party member?”

  “No,” I say, expecting her to be disappointed. A lot of ABC are party members. “Like I told you, I’m not interested. I think the party is mostly a means of advancing one’s career anyway.”

  “Exactly, and your decision not to join is a political decision.”

  “Well, then my political decision is to not be political.”

  “Exactly, that’s a political statement. You are expressing your opinion about current politics. Except you are political, everything we do is political,” she says, doggedly explaining to the unenlightened. “You do things. You rent a private apartment, right?”

  “Because if I took housing I’d have to live in some complex in Virginia or northern Pennsylvania,” I say irritated.

  “But by doing so you condone landlords.”

  “I don’t condone or not condone landlords,” I say. “It’s a practical decision, not a political one. The Great Cleansing Winds Campaign is over, San-xiang. We don’t have to analyze everyone’s lives for motives.”

  “I wasn’t saying it’s wrong,” she says mildly, “I was just pointing out that your life says something about your politics whether you think about them or not. You can either just let that happen or you can think about the kind of choices you want to make.”

  “I’d like to continue to make my choices because they fit my life rather than out of some sense of ideology,” I say. “In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it’s a belief system and most people cling to it long
after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn’t describe the real world.”

  She smiles up at me. “That’s as pure a description of an applied political theory as any I’ve ever heard.”

  I look at that little monkey face and say coldly, “Pretty good for a dumb construction tech, right?”

  “Bu cuo,” she says airily. ‘Not bad.’

  Ugly girls have to have something, I think. Sports or ideas.

  Lenin and Mao Zedong. I am sitting in front of the vid, leaned over unlacing my work boots, when I get a call. I assume that it’s Peter and I think to myself, this time I won’t let him talk me into going anywhere. It’s Tuesday night, I’m tired. I pick up my beer and wander into the kitchen to take the call, trailing boot laces.

  “Zhang here,” I say, not bothering with the visual.

  “Zhong Shan?” San-xiang says.

  “Wei,” I answer, surprised and a little disappointed.

  “My parents threw me out,” she says in her high, soft little-girl voice.

  “What?” I say. “What for?”

  “We had an argument.”

  “About what?” I say foolishly.

  “Oh, everything. Can I come to your flat?”

  “Oh, sure.” I say. I give her directions and then lace my boots and run down to the little Thai place (The Ruby Kitchen) and get take out noodles and fried chicken. I stop and pick up more beer, too. Then back to my flat, where I take the shirts I brought back from the cleaners off the chair and throw them in my room. The place looks okay. It needs to be cleaned but I’m not going to worry about that right now.