A Writer's Life (73 page)

He had not only experienced hand-to-hand combat there, he said, but had fatally shot two Vietnamese soldiers, a fact of which he was neither proud nor prone to discuss at length with his Chinese coworkers and acquaintances—and especially not with the father of his Chinese girlfriend in Beijing. During the war, her father had been a bomber pilot serving with the Vietcong. Although Dukes's girlfriend, Nanfei, was thirty years younger than himself—she had just turned twenty-one—he had proposed marriage to her, and she had accepted after discussing it with her family. Nanfei was a very talented artist, Dukes said, and he was spending all of his nonworking hours helping her to find exhibitors and buyers of her paintings—which was his way of explaining, after I had raised the question, that he lacked the time to assist me as an interpreter.

“But I might have
the
perfect person for you,” he said. “She's a Chinese-American. She works with us as a polisher. She's young and smart. I think she's done some reporting on papers back in the States. She's not dating anybody, as far as I know, so she's probably free at night. After we get back to the office, I'll introduce you. Her name is Sharline Chiang.”

While I am mindful of the fact that sometimes things sound or appear to be too good to be true, after meeting Sharline Chiang and speaking with her briefly, I was convinced, as Dukes had suggested, that she was perfect for my purposes. To begin with, she was immediately available for interpreting during her off-hours from the
China Daily
, and, as well as being bilingual, she was well mannered and personable. She wore her dark hair back in a braid, and her square-framed modish glasses set off her dark-eyed look of intelligence. She was twenty-nine, had a bachelor's
degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and in 1995 had earned her master's from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

Her workday had finished when I met her, and after I suggested that we continue our conversation over dinner at my hotel, she agreed. In the taxi she explained that she was the only child of Chinese immigrants who had gone to the United States in the late 1960s, adding that many of their kinsmen had lost contact with one another during the turmoil of the Japanese invasion of the 1930s and the Chinese civil war of the midforties. Although Sharline's paternal grandparents had escaped to Taiwan prior to the Communist takeover in 1949, taking six of their eight children, two others had been unavoidably left behind—a younger brother of her father's and an older sister. Nearly forty years would elapse before her father, then fifty-nine and residing in New Jersey, would be reunited with them at a family gathering in Taiwan in September 1996. Sharline, who was then employed as a reporter for the
Press-Enterprise
in Riverside, California, flew to Taiwan to join them, and now, three years later, working in Beijing on a one-year contract as a polisher, she was on a kind of sabbatical, reclaiming a sense of her heritage in mainland China.

When we arrived in the lobby of my hotel, the concierge waved and called out to me, “You have visitors waiting for you in the café.”

As we entered it, I saw my intrepid interpreter, Li Duan, heading toward me with his right hand extended and a smile on his face.

“I am very happy that you are here,” he said. “I have telephoned your room many times, but no answer.” He then went on to say, as he nodded in the direction of a woman seated at one of the tables, “I have brought to you the lady who is the mother of Liu Ying.”

A
FTER
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HAD INTRODUCED
S
HARLINE
C
HIANG TO
L
I
D
UAN
, leaving for later whatever difficulty I might have in explaining to him that I had just hired her for additional assistance as an interpreter, he led us through the crowded café toward a table at which sat the mother of Liu Ying, a slender and refined-looking woman of fifty-four who wore a black-and-white houndstooth checked coat and had short, wavy brown hair, a smooth-skinned, angular face, and dark eyes that reflected warmth as she stood to greet us. Her name was Sun Zhixian—or, as I referred to her from then on, Madam Sun.

As she spoke to my two interpreters, I departed to get an extra chair and summon a waiter to bring menus. When I returned, the three of them were conversing animatedly, and so I joined them as a spectator and took pleasure in the fact that my two interpreters seemed to be getting along, with Sharline Chiang helping herself to the pack of Red Pagoda cigarettes that Li Duan had laid on the table. Madam Sun politely refused Li Duan's offer of a cigarette, but she did not back away from the table as trails of smoke floated past her, and I guessed that she shared with most of the residents of Beijing—a city polluted by coal burners, construction dust, gas fumes, and gusts of westerly sand blown in from the direction of the Gobi Desert—a tolerance toward the puffers of Red Pagodas and other brands. Smoking was permitted in all the restaurants and other public places I had visited since my arrival in China (including in the elevators of my hotel), and I assumed that whatever health threats arose from the inhalation of cigarettes, those threats were minimized in the murk of 8 million tons of coal burned each year in Beijing alone.

As we three enjoyed our cocktails and canapés, and Madam Sun sipped from a glass of coconut juice, I asked Li Duan to tell her that I had received a fax from her daughter saying what a wonderful mother she was; I also asked him to get her to explain why her daughter had chosen to become a full-time soccer player. As Li Duan spoke to Madam Sun, I
noticed that Sharline Chiang had removed a pen and pad from her handbag and had jotted down what I assumed was my question, and she was now poised with a pen for Madam Sun's reply. I was concerned, for I thought that perhaps we should have extended to Madam Sun the courtesy of knowing in advance that there would be a written account of our interview; but on the contrary, after she had glanced at Sharline's notebook and seen that the words were in Chinese characters, she smiled. She could read in her own language what she was telling us. From then on, it seemed to me, she was very cooperative and candid.

“I am not exactly sure why my daughter became a soccer player,” she said, “but I think she inherited her interest in the game from her father, my late husband, who played soccer in school and was very athletic all his life. He was a physical education teacher at our neighborhood school. Unfortunately, he did not live past the age of thirty-three. He was knocked off his bicycle by a truck one night in 1978, and died instantly. Liu Ying was only four. She hardly knew him. But I still think she connects with him through the game. She grew up watching soccer matches on television, and watching the boys playing soccer in school, and she would often stand on the sidelines criticizing them—“You are not doing this right; you are not doing that right”—and a teacher said to her one day, ‘Well, if you can do better, why don't you play?' Girls did not play soccer in school, but the principal allowed her to play with the boys, and she did very well. When she was eight or nine, and did not have a soccer ball to kick, she was out in the streets kicking pebbles and small rocks. The other little girls had nice shoes, but my daughter's shoes were always scratched and tattered from kicking stones. When she was fifteen, in 1989, she was transferred from the middle school to a special school that emphasized soccer. When she was eighteen, she was promoted to the national women's team as a substitute player. She accompanied them to the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, and, when one of the starters was injured, she was sent in for twenty minutes. The team did not win, but she passed accurately and played aggressively. Soon she became a starter, and since then has traveled all over the world. And so I now have a daughter who makes her name with her feet.”

As we progressed through dinner, with Li Duan continuing to do the interpreting while Sharline Chiang kept jotting down the questions and answers, Madam Sun wanted us not to ignore the fact that she was the mother of two other children—a thirty-year-old son, Liu Tong, currently employed as a sales representative in Beijing for a door-manufacturing company, and a twenty-five-year-old daughter, Liu Yun, who was a cashier and bookkeeper at a leading department store on the western end of
Chang'an Boulevard, not far from their home. Liu Yun was actually the fraternal twin of Liu Ying, Madam Sun explained. Neither of Liu Ying's siblings were athletically inclined, and they watched soccer matches only when Liu Ying was participating. Madam Sun also mentioned that her seventy-eight-year-old mother was an active part of her household, and that the latter helped to raise the children when she, Madam Sun, had been sent to work on a dairy farm during the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which continued through 1977.

“I cried when I had to leave home,” she recalled, “but it was a time of a national crisis. There had been a great famine a few years before, and millions of people were moved from the cities to the countryside to work and live with the farmers. I spent more than eight years on a farm. I actually first went in 1967, a year before I got married and began to have children. I had been living with my parents and other relatives in the old-style courtyard house that we still live in today, on a narrow lane a few blocks west of the Forbidden City. My grandfather, an attorney, bought the place in 1911 after the fall of the last emperor. The house was later inherited by my father, a chemical engineer who attended a Jesuit-tutored college in Beijing before the Party takeover. The farm where I worked was many miles from the city, a five-hour bus ride one way, and my visits home were infrequent. On the farm I stacked hay, fed the animals, and worked in the fields. At night I slept in communal quarters with other young women.”

During one of her visits home, she was introduced to the man who would become her husband. She met him through her mother, a teacher in the elementary school where he was the physical education instructor. The wedding was an unceremonious and unphotographed occasion, at which the marital couple both wore blue Mao suits. Following the birth of their son in 1969, her husband began earning extra money as a construction worker after school, while she remained employed on the farm, returning home two or three times a month. This routine continued until 1974, when, following the birth of the twin daughters, she managed a transfer from her farming job to a lamp-making factory in the outskirts of the city, making it possible for her to live at home but nevertheless requiring a two-hour bus ride to and from work.

Her home was overcrowded, being occupied by her immediate family, her extended family, and by a dozen of what she described as “neighbors,” the latter being nonrelatives assigned to live on her parents' property by the state housing authority. Since there was insufficient shelter in Beijing to accommodate the city's burgeoning population, home owners were expected to share their living space with tenants designated by the state. Landlords such as her parents were in no position to resist, nor did they
dare to complain. If they had complained, they would have risked being branded as bourgeois elitists at a time when Chairman Mao was extolling the virtues of proletarianism and promoting a class-leveling campaign, one offering equal opportunities for the privileged and better-educated elements to learn firsthand from the peasants what it was like to exist on the lower level of the social order. Revolutionary committee leaders and other zealots set all the standards when it came to public and private behavior and expressionism, and they heckled, harassed, and otherwise silenced manifestations of dissent and nonconformity. As the firstborn child of parents with an advanced education and diminishing influence, Madam Sun served as her family's representative and hostage during the Cultural Revolution.

As she recounted her story, I did not perceive in her manner, nor in her words as translated by Sharline Chiang, any indication of disapproval toward the authorities who had exercised such vast and arbitrary control during the Cultural Revolution. I found her lack of expressed resentment surprising even as I recalled reading that Chinese people hardly ever revealed their inner feelings to outsiders, and I also reminded myself that my wonderment about her seeming stoicism might be based on the fact that, residing in New York, I regularly lived among crowds of chronic complainers. More lawyers and psychiatrists probably thrived in New York than anywhere else in the world. I also thought that her apparent absence of self-pity or contentiousness might represent her confidence and fortitude, her determination not to be humbled by an ill-tempered and punitive period in Chinese history, during which she and millions of her countrymen were subjected to deprivation, social humiliation, and no doubt betrayal from many others whom they had trusted.

What little I knew about the Cultural Revolution had come from history books and novels written by Americans or Chinese exiles, and such accounts were more or less in accord with how the Cultural Revolution would later be summarized in the
Times
by its correspondent Howard W. French—a “decade-long descent into madness.” Yet out of this madness, and perhaps because she recognized it for what it was, Madam Sun had adjusted and endured; and now I imagined her, together with millions of other middle-aged and elderly Chinese survivors of Mao's demented decade, as being part of the backbone of a transforming China, and I recalled Friedrich Nietzsche's comment: “What does not kill you will make you stronger.”

Immediately after we had finished dinner, Li Duan apologized for having to leave, explaining that he wished to return home and spend time with
his young son. It was shortly after 7:00 p.m. He asked if Sharline and I would accompany Madam Sun to her door, and I was happy to oblige. It afforded me an opportunity to see her neighborhood and perhaps receive an invitation into her home.

As our taxi proceeded slowly through the traffic of Chang'an Boulevard in the direction of the Oriental Plaza and the Forbidden City, Madam Sun pointed to a large white modern building on the north side of the boulevard; it was the Jianguo Garden Hotel and she said that this was where she had come to watch the televised broadcast of the World Cup match in California. “I would have preferred to watch the match at home,” she said, “but the sports association had invited all the players' mothers to be guests of the hotel and attend the Mother's Hope Dinner on the evening before the game. The dinner was held in a private room in the hotel and everybody was very enthusiastic and friendly. The mothers were from different parts of China, and had been brought to Beijing on planes, buses, and trains. The coach's wife was there and also some Chinese reporters. Most of us were meeting for the first time, but we suddenly felt very close because of our daughters being bonded to one another and to all of us, as well. A child leaves home and the mother's heart must follow.