China

by Aaron Greenberg | 2009

So, 22 Haitians and a Jew fly into Beijing. The Jew is me. The 22 Haitians are not. The two of them I know are Ti Robert and Marie Lynne. I know them because they are my best friend Cecille's parents. Cici's name is on all my hotel reservations for the trip. Our tour guide, Buddy Sun, when he takes attendance at the airport, says "Cici", and I have to raise my hand and say, "Here." He suspects nothing. To him it is just another American name. It was supposed to be Cici on this trip with her family. Then she went and fucked my girlfriend, and this is the only way she knows to say she's sorry without actually having to, you know, say it say it.

Ti Robert's name is Kreyol for "Little Robert." He is just shy of 6 feet. Skin with an indigo sheen when the light hits it. He wears silk suits that flow cool and easy with him when he walks. He's got a glide in his stride and a dip in his hip. And even in the heat and crush of a Beijing street in summer, he never seems overly hot. He wears Kangol hats and gold-rimmed glasses. Gold Rolex. Gold wedding band. Thin, tasteful gold neck chain.

When Cici came out gay at 14, Ti Robert tried to beat it out of her. He tried hard. He tried for three days. Then he gave up and disowned her. He has disowned her four more times since then. Robert is a prominent psychiatrist. He is a consultant for the Hartford Police. He has a reputation to consider, so Cici still lives at home. She is less a daughter and more a tenant who never cleans, and is always behind on the rent.

Marie Lynne's skin is lighter than her husband's. It is the color of rum. She is fat in a way that looks healthy. You look at her and you think, "That is the way she is supposed to look." And it is true. There is too much of her, far too much, to fit inside a smaller body. She has a bouncing, rolling way of moving. Graceful in a good sauce kind of way. Thick and powerful, but nuanced. Vigorous with substance. With subtlety and strength.

Her hair is a miracle of modern architecture. It is a minaret constructed around three thick braids that are its main support cables. One of the braids is dyed blond, another copper, and the last a metallic auburn. The rest of her hair remains its natural glossy black. It has been worked in thinner, finer braids and spun in a spiral pattern around the three colored ones. This structure on her head is earthquake-proof. It sat as still and shiny as plastic fruit through the 2-hour drive to JFK. Through the 13-hour flight to Beijing, Marie Lynne wore her old tall chef's hat to protect the do while she lounged and ordered wines and insulted the wines and fell asleep. The hat said "Port Au Prince." It was her hat from when she used to have the restaurant on Main Street. Working there was the happiest I can remember seeing her. She is a great chef, Marie Lynne. Her cooking is her greatest point of pride. Cici and I are the guinea pigs for all her experiments. Strange and wonderful multicultural Moreaus like jerk chicken satay and curried rice and red beans. The restaurant thrived. She came back to work one summer after a trip to visit her mother on the island. She found there was no work to come back to. The restaurant had been boarded up and closed. The building had been sold. Ti Robert had decided, in her absence, that he did not like his wife working.

Now, the bus from the Beijing Airport has stopped in front of our hotel. The lights come on so that we can collect our belongings. Buddy reminds us to be sure we leave nothing behind. Marie Lynne shuffles to the front. Her ass is wider than the aisle, and she eyes the space between the seats accusatorily, as if it is that size on purpose, for her inconvenience. To get through, she has to grab onto the backs of the seats and pull herself along like a rowboat. Shashi has to do the same. Shashi is the oldest woman on our trip. I have been told to call her "Gramma."

To exit the bus, Mario has to duck. This is "Toe-Toe" Mario, Big Mario, who stands nearly seven feet tall. He is not to be confused with his son, Ti Mario, who at fourteen is not yet done getting his growth, and is only six foot two. Ti Mario is accompanied on the trip by his cousin Jean Gaultier, a pudgy and good-natured little teddy bear whose name, when pronounced correctly in the Kreyol, sounds very much like "John Gotti." I am last to exit, and I thank the driver, a Mr. Wen.

As the bags are unpacked from the bus's belly, I offer my help to the older women. I ask in my ramshackle Kreyol, "S'u vle medeo avec un bagai?" I have cobbled the phrase together from the few words I have picked up. I am more or less sure that what I am saying means, "Do you need a hand with a thing?" Taujours, the oldest man in our group, puts a gnarled leather palm between my shoulder blades and laughs through his bent and broken teeth in a way that sounds a little like sneezing. "C'est un petit Haitien, oui?" he says to Ti Robert, and points to me.

"Mais oui!" Robert replies, "C'est un petit blanc Haitien!" Taujours puts a thick, stubby arm around my shoulders, pulls me close to him, and shakes me. I look at his twisted roots of fingers, at the dry, shining scars on his forearm, and cannot think where Taujours' body could have seen such wear and tear. He is an anesthesiologist. I do not know what it is with jocular Caribbean men and this profession, but they seem always to be the ones putting me under, and I am thankful for it. It is very reassuring to have a face like Taujours' smiling down at you, counting along with you backward from one hundred with his fuzzy voice and breezy accent as you melt into unconsciousness. The frankincense he wears nips gently at my septum as he embraces me for being, as Cici has called me, "Haitian by association."

The entryway to the hotel is a red pagoda supported on two red pillars. The lobby is hung with gigantic red silk lanterns dangling long graduation tassels. At the center of the high ceiling is a red chandelier. At the check-in desk, I am asked for my passport. I reach into the pocket of my shorts and panic. I pat myself down frantically. I run back out through the red pagoda and tap Buddy on the shoulder. "I lost my passport," I tell him, "I think I might have left it on the bus." The bus has begun to pull away. Buddy raises his eyebrows. Trots after the bus and waves it down. Climbs on board. Thirty seconds later, he hops back off, holding up my passport like a yellow card at a soccer game.

I talked with Buddy on the ride over from the airport. He asked me what my business was. I told him I was a writer. He asked, "Have you ever read any Chinese books?"

"The Art of War," I said, "by Sun Tzu."

I have not really read The Art of War, but I know enough quotations from it to passably bullshit having read it, and I did not want to seem the ethnocentric American. Buddy handed me his business card. It had two sides, one in English and one in Chinese. The English side said, "Buddy Sun, Tour Guide", and then his address and phone number. Underneath those it said, "'Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization.' –Sun Tzu, The Art of War." I read the quote aloud. Buddy smiled. "He is my ancestor," he said, "I am a direct descendent in the male line."

I look at Buddy's face now as he hands me my passport. He has the same dark, thick eyebrows, the same bold, sweeping brushstrokes of moustache and goatee as his ancestor, in the portrait I have seen, on the cover of the book I have not read.

"You should be more careful, Cici," he says.

"I know," I say, and I rub the back of my neck with my hand, which is the thing that I do when I am embarrassed. I start to go back inside, but something snags my brain, and I turn back to Buddy.

"Buddy."

"Yes?"

"What's your real name? Your Chinese name, I mean."

"Weizhe."

"Oh. What does it mean?"

He thinks for a moment, for the English.

"I think, 'Great Sage.'"

"How did you get 'Buddy'? Did they assign it to you? At the tour company, I mean? Or did you pick it?"

"No," he says, "I picked."

"Oh. What made you pick that one?"

He smiles big and cheesy. A kid's smile.

"I like to make friends."

Buddy takes a folded copy of our itinerary from his pocket and writes his room number down on the back of it. He holds his pen the Chinese way, his long-nailed pinky steering the tip. "Buddy," I ask, "why do I see so many men here with their pinky nails like that? Like yours?"

I have heard rumors about this nail on Chinese men. That it is for cocaine snorting, triad membership, nose picking, a million other sinister things. Buddy looks at his pinky nail. He looks at mine. Looks back at his again. His eyebrows rise. He sees what I am talking about. He says, "Ah. Is for luck." He smiles. "Good luck." I do not believe him. I let it slide. I say, "Ah." He hands me the itinerary with his room number on it. "Please do not hesitate to call if there is any problem."

"Thanks," I say.

"You are welcome. Goodnight, Cici."

"Goodnight, Buddy."

He turns and starts into the hotel. Remembers something. Stops. Turns to face me again. He gestures grandly to the gaudy pagoda'd entryway, to the taxi stand in the hotel drive. The glow from the hotel's lanterns dyes everything red: the monsoon puddles in the street, the line of cab windows, the cabbies' smoke, the tea in their thermoses, my glasses. Buddy's pinky talon streaks red through the air. Anywhere else in the world this would all look very ominous. All this red. The color they light the stage when someone is murdered in a play. Here, it is the color of weddings and festivals. The big party color. Buddy flashes a gameshow face, throws his arms out wide and says, "Welcome to China!"

Traffic sounds.

One of the cabbies coughs.

I cough.

I say, "Thanks."

I stand outside after Buddy has gone and watch the dogfight chaos of Beijing traffic screaming by. My lungs claw themselves for a cigarette. I wonder, in this age of airplane terrorism, just who the fuck's idea it was to make a 13-hour flight over the pole non-smoking. Just who the fuck's idea to screen Kung Fu Hustle back to back with an unwatchable, plotless Bollywood farce called Yoga Beauty three times over each. By hour 10 even I, a nice, neatly circumcised Jewish boy from Queens who loves his mother was ready to take box cutter in hand and send us all down flaming into Siberia. A little for the glory of Allah, but mostly for the 71 Camel Turkish Royals that would doubtless await me in Heaven.

The hotel gift shop is set on a loading dock just to the left of the main entrance. They have incense and those little kung fu master dolls and handmade jewelry and condoms and lame swords. The lamest swords: gaudy plastic jewel encrusted hilts supposed to look like dragons' mouths where the flimsy, rattling blade is the tongue.

I linger at the shelves of little statues. In the weeks before I left for China, I went around telling all my friends and relatives that I was making a run over to China, and did they want anything while I was out. It tickled me to say it like that. Like I was going to the 7-11. I was such a card. I killed me. My father, the Buddhist, had asked me for a statue of Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of mercy and compassion, to sit in the little shrine he keeps in our basement. He gave me a picture for reference, a caption of the Bodhisattva's name in Chinese at the bottom. I feel like part of a search party, "Have you seen this woman?" I scan the shelves and do not see her. I scan the shelves behind the counter for my cigarettes.

They do not have Camel Turkish Royals.

They do not have Camel anything.

I thumb through my pocket phrasebook with its smiling cartoon communists bicycling merrily across the cover in their blue proletarian coveralls. I find the word for "tobacco." The word is "chou-yen ma," or maybe that is the phrase to ask for tobacco, and not just the single word. It seems like more than one word. I am unsure. I walk up to the counter. The shopkeeper is this miniscule woman with hair like combed-out record vinyl, beautifully carved cheekbones, and easily the smoothest forehead I have ever seen. I would have sex with just her forehead. Goddammit I would find a way.

I smile shyly at her. I mime smoking with my fingers and say, "chou-yen ma?" I pitch my voice high at "chou," slide it down an octave for "yen," and let it bounce back up a half-step for "ma." Chinese is fun this way. It is an intoned language. Not an inflected one like English. The way you pitch your voice changes the meaning of the words. The concept is beautiful. A language like music. People at the market, at the dinner table, making love, joking and debating, cursing one another out in song. But whatever starry-eyed ancient romantic thought up musical Chinese failed to take into account that lots of people, most people, cannot carry a tune to save their lives.

The shopkeeper nodes decisively, like a soldier. Her tiny hand darts under the counter, comes back up, and slaps a bright yellow pack down on the glass. The pack is embossed with a stylized golden dragon, grinning and winking with red eyes. The brand name is stamped on it in Chinese. The shopkeeper lightly raps the pack with the back of her index knuckle. "Long Life," she declares, "best Chinese cigarette. Eight Yuan." I pay her the dollar. I say, "Shyeh-shyeh." She smiles, nods her exquisite forehead at me, and says, "Bullshit."

I say, "What?"

She says, "Bullshit," again.

"Excuse me?"

"Bullshit."

I shake my head. I stare at her intently for a moment, as though I could discern with my eyes the thing that I have done in her presence that is bullshit.

She laughs at me.

"Bu-shyeh," she says, "like English 'You are welcome.'"

"Oh," I say, and I thank her again. For telling me that I am welcome. She says, "Bu-shyeh," again. For saying thank you. I leave, so that we do not get caught in an endless cycle of politeness.

I sit on the edge of the loading dock. I dangle my legs and bounce my heels against the concrete. I peel the cellophane from the yellow pack. I slide out a Long Life and examine it. My friend Tobi has asked me to bring her a carton of the best cigarettes I find in China, so I am being a connoisseur. The thing I am holding between my index and middle fingers is less cigarette and more ordinance. Unfiltered. Nearly six inches long. Big around as a cigar. The heavy artillery in the war against your lungs. It is a tobacco cannon. A tar bomb. An intercontinental ballistic nicotine missile. The dragon from the box winds its way around every fat incendiary. It reminds me of the leering predatory mouths you see painted under the noses of fighter jets and helicopter gun ships. I light up with three neat clicking spurts from a girl's lighter I picked up off the ground at the Beijing airport. It is one of those Princess lighters. It is covered with catty little one liners like, "Where have I been all your life?" and "Yes I am out of your league." The Long Life tastes like scorched eggs. It is rolled in thick paper. It will burn slow. I guess maybe that is why they call them that. I will be here awhile. I zone out on the light from the streetlamps, smeared across the slick skins of passing cars. I get to thinking.

How I got myself into this.

. . .

My second senior year. Finals. Do or die. Pretzel-legged on my bed in the UConn dorms. Sucking down the Saga Volsunga on an Adderall binge, about to eviscerate a calzone with my teeth. Four days sleepless and eatless. Sleepless because of the adderall. Eatless because my meal plan was gone. And four days ago Kate had called from London, sobbing that they had been drunk. So drunk. That she was ever so sorry. Six months ago it happened but she had meant to never tell me, had meant me never to know. Both of them had meant this. They had agreed the morning after that it was better that way, that what I did not know would not hurt me. But my spider sense had tingled something awful. I had smelled a rat. On instinct, I had probed. I had asked the right questions, or the wrong ones, and this, this phone call, was her finally cracking. She cried and confessed. I would have never admitted it then, but the accent had made it easier to take. Barely. Not enough to stop me hanging up on her, getting Cici's number wrong twice with how my hands were shaking. Asking her point blank on the verge of tears and trying like all fuck to sound like some kind of man and she laughed at me. Laughed long and loud and ridiculous how I would even think she could and how long had we known each other and how dare Kate and how dare I.

For the next four days those were their stories and they were sticking to them. Cici was a matchless virtuoso of the lie. A real Mozart. A real artiste. Flawless delivery. Timing. Execution. The balls to look you right in the eye. And she would have got away with it too. If Kate had had the slightest reason to make it up. But she didn't. And I knew it. And Cici knew I knew it. But she was too much of a pro not to stick with what every politician will tell you: Deny, deny, deny.

My roommate Avi's large intestine had been removed in high school after a bout of ulcerative colitis. To avoid a colostomy bag, the doctors had rerouted his plumbing through his small intestine. He took pressurized dumps now. His shits sounded like somebody setting off depth charges. In return for how much this hurt, the doctors had given him a prescription for a candy store of pain meds he could sell with no overhead. Avi, mensch that he was, after four days of watching me go through hell on an empty stomach, finally took pity and gave me some drug money for a calzone. My teeth about to breach crust, the heat from the cheese inside steaming out and fogging my glasses, there was a knock at the door. Shave and a haircut. Two bits. I cursed. Got up and looked out the peephole to see if it was anyone ignorable.

Stubby dreadlocks stuffed under a trucker had. I opened the door. Cici stood there, hands in pockets, eyes on orange patent leather Airwalks. She cleared her throat.

"We need to talk." In her hazy, Courtney Love voice.

I said, "Yeah," and looked over my shoulder, said a silent farewell to the virgin calzone. I looked back at Cici, at her smooth, boyish face, and said, "Yeah, I guess we do."

She rolled a blunt in the parking lot and told me. They were drunk. So drunk. Bedded down together. Only place in the room that wasn't floor. Just fingers, no tongue. Nobody came, was the most important part for me. For my screaming ego. She would make it up to me.

The trip came a few months later. The family had been planning it all year. Cici ducked out at the last minute. Said she had to take a class. And it would have been a crime to waste the ticket. And hey, wasn't I writing about China? And hey, wouldn't it help to, she didn't know, go over there and smell it? It felt like a buyoff, like hush money. Like a molester's ice cream sundae, all the good it did was to get the taste out of my mouth. And maybe I was being a hardass. And maybe it was really just a nice thing she was doing. And maybe ten years of friendship had earned her a fair shot at penance. But fuck fair. I just wasn't done being mad yet.

And you bet your ass I ate that ice cream sundae. I mean come on. It's ice cream.

. . .

The Long Life is dead. The last drag tastes faintly rusty. I have the feeling that it has smoked me, rather than the other way around. Makes me think of that stupid Yakov Smirnoff bit. I flick the still-burning filter. It sears orange spirals in the air and fizzles on the wet concrete below. A few guys are practicing spinning outside crescent kicks on the wall behind me. They are doing the drill where you try and match the height of your kick to the height of a crack in the wall, a higher crack with each successive kick. They practice with cigarettes between their teeth, the way you see jazz musicians do. It seems to fit. It is a loose, jazzy style they use. They are talking to one another and laughing. They have just gotten off work at the hotel. They are dressed business casual. Their ties are loosened, shirts unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled up to elbows. The oil-slick toes of their shoes flicker in the air with the lights from the shop, the street, the hotel, reflected in the patent leather. The shopkeeper with the forehead is leaned up against the doorway of her store, smoking and watching the men practice. She tosses what sound like sarcastic one-liners into the holes of the men's conversation every so often. She slays them with these. Stops them mid-kick and doubles them over.

I'm watching this over my left shoulder when someone tags my right. I jump. I jerk my head to the right, toward the hotel entryway, and search for the person who has made me "It." Someone peeks out at me from behind the smooth red pillar. A little girl. Four, maybe five years old. I can see just a sliver of her. Tiny dots of toes strapped into a white plastic sandal, the hem of a white cotton dress, a glossy black loop of pigtail, a curve of chubby cheek, the corner of a smile. One large, black eye. She shuffles her foot, and a bright pinpoint of red light winks at me from the heel of her sandal. They are those kind of sandals. She giggles. She molds her little hands to the curve of the pillar, and smushes her face into the backs of them. She peeks out to see whether I am still looking, and I still am, so she hides her face again.

I hide my face, and she peeks. I peek and she hides. We have ourselves a Mexican standoff of peekaboo. I flinch first. She makes a monster noise and leaps out at me, sincere enough to scare me a little. While in the air, she takes a deep breath in. As she lands, her heels smack the concrete and flash red, and she blows a long, juicy raspberry up into my face. She gets some really good distance for how small she is. She cannot be more than 3 feet high, but I have to untie the blue bandana from the belt loop of my shorts to wipe her spit from my cheeks. I cannot help but be impressed. She jumps up and tries to snatch the bandana from my hands, but it is too high up for her. I tie it back onto my belt loop. She squats down and tugs at it some to see what it is about. I let her. She finds that it is not as interesting as it looks, so she strikes up a conversation.

The conversation is one-sided. She is a real chatterbox. Even if I knew any of the same words that she does, I couldn't get one in edgewise. Her voice is small, but loud. There is something about it of Jack Russell terriers, and something of the small birds that make you cover your head with a pillow early mornings. Her voice climbs and dives and whirls through all the reedy birdsong acrobatics of Mandarin. She talks with her whole body. An interpretive modern dance to the post-tonal acid jazz that is coming out of her. She draws shapes in the air with her hands and spins circles and slaps her knees and stamps her feet, and counts invisible things on her fingers. Then she squats down and counts some more invisible things in very neat rows on the ground. I am not sure if they are the same invisible things.

I do not understand a word until she points to herself and says, "Yan," and I do not really understand that either, but I guess it is her name. She goes quiet and looks at me. I am startled by how suddenly it is my turn to say something. I point to her and say, "Yan." She does rollercoaster arms and says, "Yan!" I point to myself and say my name. Not "Cici," but my real name. She is the first person in China I have told it to. She does not seem to grasp the gravity of this. She says something that sounds like a question. I take my phrasebook out of my pocket and look for something that looks anything like how her words sounded. I do not find it. I shrug my shoulders and say, "Bu zhi dao," which is, "I don't know."

Yan laughs a boiling geyser. She sprints frantic circles around me singing, "Buzhidao! Buzhidao! Buzhibuzhibuzhidao!" As she is making her sixth or seventh lap around me, one of the kicking men smoothly scoops her up without breaking her stride or his own. He brings her around with him, squealing and squirming, as he goes into his next kick. At the apex of it, he could pucker up and kiss his own thigh. The pleat in his slacks snaps like a flag with the little breeze he makes in spinning. When he puts Yan down, she tries the kick herself, and does pretty well at it. It is that indestructible little kid bendiness that does it for her. After she has put her foot down, she does a backward somersault at me. She gets to her feet awkwardly. Her roll has gotten her turned around a bit. When she gets her bearings, she looks at me expectantly. When I do not do anything, she starts talking at me again, in Mandarin, laughing and miming with her hands. She wants to see a trick.

I only know one trick. It is a front shoulder-roll. Nothing fancy. Not very impressive to grownups. I put my right foot forward, and let the ground draw a diagonal line across my back, from my right shoulder to my left hip. I come up to my feet at the end of the roll and do a "Ta-dah!" with my arms, but find that I have slightly misgauged the distance. I have come up too close to Yan. My sudden nearness startles her. She loses her balance, and sits down hard on the concrete. Her face twists up and goes red. She squeezes her eyes shut, takes a deep breath, and lets it rip.

If there is not a Beijing death metal scene, there will be as soon as Yan gets old enough to thrash. Yan's tantrum reminds me why American parents call them "meltdowns." She does not have a volume so much as she has a blast radius. Everyone is looking. The kickers, the doorman, the cab drivers, people passing on the sidewalk, people passing across the street, the Haitians swirling their glasses of Johnny Walker Black Label in the bar. The shopkeeper trots over, hoists Yan up, and starts to bounce her. Nobody else seems much concerned. Yan drops her cheek on the shopkeeper's shoulder. The shopkeeper is just fast enough to gently roll Yan's head away from her ear before things get seismic.

I tear through my phrasebook for "I'm sorry." I find it. It is, "Dui bu qi." No time to look at the pronunciation guide. I take a stab at it. I say, "Dui bu qi!" The shopkeeper squints at me, the first few tries, as though I am out of focus. I tweak the pronunciation a bit, then a bit more, then the shopkeeper's eyebrows rise. She smiles over Yan's trembling little ball of shoulder and says, "Mei guanxi." I look it up in my book. I find it on the same page as, "I'm sorry." It is the thing you say when you are apologized to. It means, "It doesn't matter." I look back up at Yan's heaving back, wracked with sobbing hiccups and channeling the monomaniac focus of muscle and breath that it takes to make a noise that big from a person that small, and it doesn't look anything like something not mattering. I say, "Dui bu qi," again, this time just to Yan. She grunts and jerks her head violently away from the sound of my voice. She is having no part of any words from me, apologies or otherwise. And maybe she's not being fair. But fuck fair.

I search the book for something more to say, a way to offer help, or to ask whether Yan is hurt. I am feverishly Frankensteining words and phrases together when my view of the page is blocked by an elegant hand with long, well-manicured thumb and pinky nails. The hand is holding a cigarette between its index and middle fingers, and is offering it to me palm-up. I close the book and take the cigarette. It is a brand I am not familiar with. There is a dark blue, satin-textured band around the filter. My eyes follow the arm up to the face of one of the kickers. The one who scooped Yan up. His face is handsome in a big cat kind of way. Sleek with strong cheekbones and a smoothly rounded nose. Dark, rich brows and a tiger smile. He lights my smoke for me and lights one for himself. We sit down together on the loading dock. I ask him in English, "Is Yan okay?"

"Yes. Okay." he says, and waves his hand to dismiss my worry. I point to myself and say my name and hold out my hand for him to shake. He shakes it, and says, "Wong." He speaks about as much English as I speak Chinese, so we speak in gestures. I point to his long thumb and pinky nails and put on a look of mystification. He smiles and raises his eyebrows. He removes a black suede cord from around his neck, from which hangs a blue-jeweled pendant. It is one of the handmade pieces I noticed in the hotel gift shop. I point to the display case in the shop, and then back to him, to his hands, and he nods. He makes the jewelry for the gift shop. He beckons my eyes to the necklace. With the aid of his fine, sharp talons, he undoes the intricate piece of decorative knot work that weaves in and out among the pendant's hollow places to bind it to the cord. Then he deftly does it up again. He smiles, and hands me the necklace. I hand it back to him. He hands it back to me again. I make a mental note to ask Buddy tomorrow whether he is a jewelry-maker when he is not a tour guide. In the stillness of the moment, I notice that the screaming has stopped. I look back, over my right shoulder, to where the shopkeeper stood holding Yan a moment ago. There is no one there now. I hear the wet staccato of plastic soles on pavement. I feel a tiny hand on my left shoulder. She laughs. She jumps up and down and motions for me to do my trick again. I do it, sure to roll away from her this time. She claps when I am done, takes me by the hand, and yanks me into the gift shop. She chatters on and on, leading me around the shop and pointing to things and talking about them. I buy for my friend, Tobi, a carton of the kind of cigarette Wong gave me. They are called "Shangri-La's" I find, and are considered very classy. After I buy the cigarettes, I look up "goodnight" in my phrasebook. It is "wanan." I crouch down in front of Yan and say, "Wanan," and wave goodbye. She says, "wanan," and lies down on the floor of her mother's shop and pretends to go to sleep.

. . .

The next day, the Haitians and I begin our tour. Everywhere we go, I find we are celebrities. Most of the people here have never seen anyone in person of the Haitians' size or color. The little kids are very curious. They want to touch the smooth, dark skin and trace the rich curl of the hair. Toe-Toe Mario, at his great height, is often stopped and asked to pose for pictures. When he is approached with a camera, he nods gravely and smiles dutifully, a politician's smile. The first attraction today is the Temple of Heaven. We walk through the park outside the Temple for some time before actually going in. We watch the old women at their tai chi, their bodies writing underwater poetry. Taujours is enthralled. "C'est un bagai," he says, "c'est bel!" And he leaps into the ranks of practitioners to join in. He towers over the little old lady next to him. She is dressed in pale pink silk, and he in black denim shorts, a green mesh jersey, a Greek fisherman's cap, and aviator shades. He smiles down at her and she smiles up at him, and Taujours watches her for the next steps. She slows a little to accommodate him.

I pick up a piece of broken cobblestone from just outside the Temple of Heaven, where they are doing some road work. My friend, Mike, only ever asks for a rock from the place you are going to. And it has to not be an important rock. He is a history teacher. He has a thing about preservation. I found out the hard way that he did not want a piece of the Salisbury Cathedral. Or even the tiniest corner of tile out of Versailles.

We walk in slow, halting circles around the Temple of Heaven. White palisades, intricate colored tile, and three pagodas that are supposed to be, I think, a dragon landing strip for when the Emperor's father came to visit. The dragon was not the Emperor's father's ride. The dragon was the Emperor's father.

After that, we go to lunch.

I do not know what it is about Jews and Chinese food. I have heard various theories: that it is the only place open on Christmas, that we are similar cultures, of comparable ages and values, that we live in such proximity to one another in places like Queens and Boca Raton. Whatever the case, for better or for worse, I have inherited this Sino-Semitic bloc. And upon learning that I was to go to China, my inner exclamation was not, "The Great Wall!" or "The Forbidden City!" or "The Terra Cotta Soldiers!", but rather, "Chinese food for every meal!"

In a Woody Allen movie, there is a joke that goes like this: Woody goes to Hell and meets his father, who is there because his son has not forgiven him for his failings as a parent. Stricken by guilt, Woody forgives his father on the spot, pleading with the devil to, "Send him to Heaven!" But Woody's father protests, "I'm a Jew, I don't believe in Heaven." "Well where do you want to go?" asks Woody. "A Chinese restaurant!" his father proudly replies.

The Haitians are not so enthused. Family meals at Cici's house are legendary. On the Fourth of July, they have a barbecue in the back yard with three rows of grills. They roast two whole goats on spits. There are not so much three square meals as there is one round one that lasts all day. We sit down in this four-star Beijing restaurant to dinner plates the size of American tea-saucers. Marie Lynne lifts one up dubiously. "It's for appetizers," she says, holding it up to the waiter, "it's for appetizers, yeah?" It is not for appetizers. It is for everything. It is my understanding that they have a lot of people to feed here.

We fly to Xi'an Province the next day, for the Tomb of the Terra Cotta Soldiers. 10,000 frozen men and horses, protecting the grave of the first Emperor. At first, you think "They're made of clay, what are they going to protect?" Then you walk into their room and shit yourself, because there are ten thousand little guys in armor pointing lances and swords at you. True, you are taller, and more technologically advanced, and animate, but they have you hopelessly outnumbered.

At this open market, near the tomb, I find the mother lode of gifts. An alabaster Guanyin for my father. The perfect porcelain tea set for my mother. The Buddhist rosary for Cassion, who wanted to walk around with it hung from his neck like a movie samurai. Nevermind that samurai are Japanese. Alton, my biologist friend, tried to stump me. When I went to him and asked, "What do you want from China?" He told me he had to think about it. Three in the morning the day I left, I got a phone call. "All the tea," he said, and hung up. I find a loophole. The tea seller at the Xi'an market has a map of all the provinces, and a different kind of tea from every one. I have him wrap me up a few cups' worth of each in neat little packets, and feel some of the smuggest smug I have ever felt. Until, on the way back to the hotel, all the little packets hatch into hundreds of little flying bugs.

After Xi'an, we fly to Guilin. We take a cruise on the Li River to see the karst peaks that loom on the banks; huge natural pillars, strangely slender and sueded with moss. Fishermen on the Li fish the way they have for hundreds of years. They raise ugly black fisher birds with long scraggly necks. The fisherman ties a cord very tightly around the base of the bird's neck, lets the bird loose, and waits for it to catch a fish. The cord prevents the bird from swallowing the fish, so it spits it up into the fisherman's bucket. As we travel up the river, vendors pole rafts out to our boat, hook themselves onto the sides, and start hocking the same trinkets I've seen at a million little roadside kiosks by now. I wonder how they all end up with the same stock.

From Guilin, we fly to Shanghai, to the Copy Market. This is what Marie Lynne has been gearing up for. The Haitians are avid hagglers, as are the Chinese. To watch them go at it together is nothing short of epic. Marie Lynne is Shakespearean about it. She bullies and cajoles and seduces and plays hard-to-get like a champ. I see her leave so many shops, nose in the air, and wait for a count of five for the shopkeeper to come running breathlessly out after her, frantically singing out the price she wanted. I find a very convincing "Louis Vuitton" bag for my sister, for ten American, before we have to catch the plane back to Beijing. To the Great Wall, which we have saved for last.

And what the hell do I say about the thing? It's Great. It's a Wall. It's in China. People ride bicycles on top of it. It is big enough to have a traffic problem. I look into the little piles of trash that have been thrown over the side to see if I can maybe spot one black-fletched Mongol arrow, somehow missed by archaeologists. I am not that lucky. I see flattened McDonald's fry containers, soft drink straws, a child's shoe. To get back to the bus, we have to run a blockade of shouting kiosks, selling the same things they sell in Xi'an, in Guilin, in Shanghai. I realize, suddenly, that I have bought nothing for Cici. She did not ask for anything.

I stop, and I buy her a mask.

Send all comments & inquiries to letters@borderhopping.net

Copyright © JAMILA productions. All Rights Reserved.