Beautiful Country (2 page)

The truth is that it was never my decision to go to Beijing. My father decided I would go, and that was all there was to say. I've come to understand that he must have believed time and distance were correlated, that somehow the farther away he sent me the faster things would heal. Perhaps he didn't understand that memories have a way of finding you wherever you are.

I knew I needed to leave home, I knew I needed to be somewhere else for a while, but I didn't understand why I had to go to Beijing. I wanted to go to Florida where I could play tennis for six hours a day against the top players in the United States. I once told my father that, but he dismissed me and said it would be much better for me to go to Beijing. I didn't agree with him, but I didn't object because I didn't want to disappoint him. If our father had decided to ship Tom off to Beijing, he would have stood up for himself. But I have never been very good about confronting my father. I suppose my hesitation came from a fear that he would think less of me.

Maybe it was Tom's imagination that had allowed him to resist in ways I could not. I remember once when Tom was twelve, he convinced all the kids in his class to act in a play he had written.
He allowed me to believe that I was his assistant director, writer, and general sidekick. The work was titled
Macbeth in the Internet Age—
the plot was true to Shakespeare, except that Macbeth's addiction to surfing the Web with Dunsinane's recently acquired high-speed internet derailed his ambition, and Lady Macbeth had to carry out the gruesome murders by herself. Tom ended his play with me walking out onstage with a shark mask and asking the audience, “What do you want out of life?”

He died on a Saturday in January when he was sixteen and I was thirteen. The official cause of death was listed as “MDMA intoxication.” The drugs he and his friends took were cut with something toxic, and Tom's body had reacted badly to it. That was what it said in the newspaper anyway. It didn't make sense to me at the time. I didn't even know what any of that was back then. All I knew was that there must have been some mistake because drugs were something drug addicts did, not my older brother.

The day after he died, I locked myself in my room and refused to open the door. My father had to call a locksmith to remove the lock completely. He didn't want there to be any chance that I did it again. I don't remember a lot from those first few weeks, but I do remember being afraid to fall asleep because I was scared of the dreams and nightmares I might have. And I remember always feeling as if I were on the verge of throwing up. It wasn't just sadness. It was some horrible combination of anger and guilt. I remember feeling that in some way it was my fault. It wasn't, of course, but that guilt nevertheless was there. I couldn't escape the thought that if I had done something differently that night, Tom would still be alive. If only I hadn't gotten mad at him over the PlayStation. Or if I had asked him to take me to see a movie, or if I had told my father that I had a math test I needed Tom to
help me study for. If I had done that, he never would have left to meet up with his friends. And he wouldn't have died. I couldn't get that out of my head.

The day after he died I took a tennis racket and started smashing it into my PlayStation as hard as I could. I only stopped when our housekeeper came in and wrenched the racket from my hands. By the time she came in, the game console was already scattered across the floor, broken fragments of plastic and metal. The last time I saw Tom we had an argument over that PlayStation. I had told him he wasn't allowed to use it anymore because he always cheated when we played. I smashed it into pieces because I couldn't bear looking at it anymore. Every time I looked at it, I was reminded of that conversation and it filled me with this terrible guilt over what I had said to my brother the last time I had seen him alive.

After that incident, my father canceled a business trip and drove me out to East Hampton to spend a week at his sister's summerhouse. The Hamptons were deserted at that time of year and we had the house to ourselves. Getting away for that week helped. It was too much being at home. Everywhere I looked I was reminded of Tom.

I didn't want to go back to school, but the therapist they made me see told my father that I should start school again. She said being reintegrated with my peer group would help with my recovery. I don't think it was the right decision. Everyone at school treated me differently. They were too nice; their averted eyes and muted voices made me more aware of Tom's absence. My friends had become afraid to laugh or make jokes in front of the boy whose brother had just died. I could tell that my presence had become a burden on them.

I couldn't get myself to care about school. I didn't do my homework, I didn't study for tests, and I began to get Ds and Fs when I had previously received mostly As and some Bs. But my father only pulled me out of school after I got in a fight with Jake Green during a game of basketball at recess. Jake started cracking jokes about my brother and when he didn't stop I ran over and pushed him so he fell down on the ground, and I started kicking him as hard as I could in the stomach. He started crying but still I didn't stop, and then I kicked him in the face, and I broke his nose. I don't remember stopping, even when there was blood all over my sneakers. My father pulled me out of the school after that. He pulled me out because the school told him that they were going to expel me if he didn't. I finished the eighth-grade syllabus with tutors at home.

I started playing tennis again around the time I was sent back to school. While I struggled in school, I did well in tennis. Each day I would exhaust myself up to the point where I had nothing left in me. All my energy and emotions were concentrated on the simple action of hitting a ball back over a net. My father must have picked up on the fact that tennis was helping me, because about a month after he pulled me out of school, we started talking about the idea of my taking a year off to play tennis.

It was about that time that one of his business associates, Mr. Richard Zhang, came and stayed at our house for a weekend to discuss a real estate venture my father had proposed setting up with him in China. He and my father spent most of the weekend in my father's study talking, but on Saturday afternoon they came out to the tennis courts to watch me practice. At dinner that night, my father quizzed Mr. Zhang about the tennis standards in China. It turned out that one of Mr. Zhang's close friends was
a senior official in the Chinese government and currently served as Minister of Sport. Over dinner, I saw the idea of sending me to China begin to take shape. Theoretically, my father asked Mr. Zhang, would a foreigner be allowed to practice within the Chinese State's sport system? Could Mr. Zhang's friend arrange for that to happen? Did he know any good language schools in Beijing? I watched as each potential obstacle was dismissed by Mr. Zhang, who either had a ready solution to each problem or simply said that he was sure that something could be arranged. As my future was being decided in front of me, I waited for the one question I longed for my father to ask.
What did I think about the idea?
But the opportunity never came.

It took me some time to understand that sending me to China was my father's way of protecting me. That was the way he was. I never had the kind of relationship with my father many of my peers had with theirs who were present at every soccer match, every science fair, every school play. Though I knew he cared deeply for me, he was aloof and reserved, rarely showing signs of approval, which of course made me strive for it all the more. Besides, I had my older brother, Tom. Tom was not only my hero, the person I looked up to more than anyone else in the world, he was also my best friend. After his death, my father became even more remote.

I think that his aloofness allowed him the illusion of control. I have no memory of my mother. She died when I was only two and Tom was five. It happened just after she had dropped Tom off at kindergarten. The weather was bad and a truck in front of her hit a patch of black ice and lost control, jack-knifing and sending my mother's Range Rover into an airborne spiral down an embankment. Sometimes late at night Tom would wonder out
loud to me that if he had taken five more seconds to get dressed or to eat his breakfast or to give her one last kiss before he got out of the car, she would still be alive. I have no memory of my mother. I used to envy Tom for his, but now that he's gone, I am glad I don't remember her. No one should have to feel that kind of loss twice.

Before I left for China, my father handed me a copy of a letter his father had received from his father—a short note written by my great-grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, who counseled his son that in confronting choices, the three most important things to remember were duty, honesty, and courage. Duty was about shunning temptation and fulfilling your responsibilities to others. Honesty was about always being truthful. And courage was about having the strength to do the right thing. I never knew whether this point of view came from the New England fierceness of my great-grandfather's maternal line or the Scottish stoicism of his paternal side, but I suspected the latter. If you had asked me, before that year, about courage, I would have given you a crisp, clear answer. On the tennis court, it was straightforward. Courage was about honesty, about always being brave enough to tell the truth—the ball was either in or out, nothing unclear or ambiguous.

I guess the message in this handed-down letter was my father's version of a St. Christopher's medal, but over the course of the next year, I realized that what my father had passed on to me was, at best, incomplete. I came to understand that duty and honesty and courage were lines that crossed and overlapped—they weren't always straight or compatible. The difficulty was in knowing which of the lines was most important.

As I walked through customs out into the airport lobby, I searched for a woman who matched the photograph I had been given. Victoria Liu had worked as a journalist for a news network in Guizhou Province. She had recently come to Beijing with her husband, who was an artist, but she hadn't been able to find any work in the city as a journalist. My father had interviewed Victoria on one of his trips to Beijing and thought she would be a good person to look after me.

My father had told me that most Chinese people who deal with Westerners have two names, their real name and an English name. In China, the meaning of their adopted English name is very important. Men preferred strong, masculine names like Michael or Jack while women often chose the names of flowers such as Lily or Ivy or Violet. Victoria's real name was Zhong. She later told me that she had chosen the name Victoria as her English name because of Victoria Beckham.

I heard someone call my name. A slender young woman with short, spiked black hair, tight jeans, a neon purple sweater, and orange and brown rubber-topped tennis shoes waved at me with one hand as she held a pink cell phone to her ear with the other.
Could this be Victoria? I looked back at the photo and then back at her. The two women looked nothing alike, but the board she held had my name misspelled,
Chas Robretsn.

The woman tucked the sign under her arm, spoke a few words into the pink cell phone, and then approached me with a wide smile. She held her hand out and introduced herself as Victoria and then pulled the pink phone out again. She said she was calling the driver to pull the car up. As she spoke on the phone I examined my new guardian more carefully, unsure what to make of her. She seemed cooler than I had imagined. I felt relieved she didn't appear to be too strict or overbearing.

I followed her out to the curb where we waited for the car. The air was thick, and even though it was early August, the sky had the kind of white-gray look that presages the coming of snow. The thick, smog-filled air obscured the horizon, and buildings appeared as little more than hazy outlines, like faded charcoal lines drawn on a cloud. Victoria waved her hand as a black Audi sedan pulled up. Once we were in the car, Victoria called Richard Zhang, who had offered to let me stay with his family in Beijing, and informed him that we were on our way.

“Maybe one hour to get to Beijing. Not long way, but traffic very bad.” Victoria tumbled through her words. I was tired and after a few minutes I closed my eyes and dozed off.

I awoke to the sound of fireworks. It was dark and we were in the midst of the city. Cheaply built apartment buildings, four or five stories tall, lined the streets lit by dim orange streetlamps. All around us fireworks exploded in the night air. The rockets traced blurred red and green and yellow lines through the dark smog. There seemed to be no pattern as to how and when they were set off. Unlike the precise, choreographed performances I
had seen on the Fourth of July, these fireworks were fired in a series of mistimed, unordered volleys.

We drover farther and passed by a roadside stand selling fireworks. Discarded firework casings, fragments of charred cardboard, littered the street like confetti. To my amazement, I saw men with their wives and children setting off fireworks right next to the stand, in the middle of a busy city street. A car even had to swerve to avoid driving over a bundle of freshly lit firecrackers. It was chaos.

“What's going on?” I asked Victoria.

“Fireworks have been banned for more than ten years,” Victoria said. “They just changed the rule. Today is the first day they are allowed again.”

“They can just set them off right here? In the middle of the city?”

“Sure,” Victoria said. “Why not?”

The slow stop-and-start traffic made me queasy. I opened the window and looked at the acres of buildings that surrounded us, specters in the dark smog. The air was so heavy and stale that I had difficulty taking a deep breath. Everywhere I looked, people were moving. Men and women on bicycles, men and women walking, all pushing toward home at the end of the day. I wondered what Tom would have made of this scene. When we would drive to New York City or to the Hamptons, Tom would make up games for me to help pass the long sit-still hours in the car. A box in a passing car became a box filled with stolen jewels, a sleeping passenger would turn into a kidnapped victim who needed rescuing, and an old man in a vintage Cadillac became a Mob kingpin whom we had to tail. It seems silly now, but back then Tom made it all feel real to me. As we got closer to the center of
the city, I saw fifty or sixty bicycles standing in a row. Victoria noticed what had caught my eye, and she commented, “Everyone rides bikes to the bus and subway station.”

“Don't they have to worry about them getting stolen?”

“Stolen?”

“The bikes.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You have to lock them. But even if you use lock, your bike still getting stolen. At least two times, every year.”

I checked my watch. We had been in the car over an hour and a half. I leaned my head back and tried to fall asleep again but I had no luck. I was nervous about meeting the rest of my host family. My father had told me the Zhangs had kids who spoke English. He hadn't known how old they were though. We made a series of turns and, in one case, I could have sworn our driver went into the lane of oncoming traffic to bypass the clogged lane we were stuck in. I tapped Victoria and mouthed my concern, but she just smiled and said, “Don't worry, Driver Wu very good.” She smiled again and gave me a thumbs-up.

“Is that what you call him?” I asked. “Driver Wu?”

“Yes, that's what he likes to be called. It's a sign of respect. Like how you say professor or doctor. This a very good job.”

We drove through a series of construction areas beside a murky, dark green lake and a small park before stopping in front of a six-foot white gate. Behind the gate stood four identical high-rise apartment buildings, twenty stories tall. Two armed security guards appeared from the gatehouse and approached our car. Victoria explained that we were coming to see the Zhangs. One of the guards nodded and returned to the gatehouse where he picked up a phone and dialed a number. The second guard remained by our car holding his rifle.

“Why do they need guards?” I asked Victoria.

“You have to be very careful, there many robberies. The Zhangs worried about kidnappings. So many people come to Beijing from the country and many people very desperate.” The first guard hung up the phone and shouted something to the second. The white gate retracted into the wall and allowed us to pass. Victoria took out her pink phone and called someone, speaking too fast for me to understand. “Just tell to them that we're here,” Victoria said.

Mrs. Zhang, who was waiting outside the apartment building, was dressed in navy slacks and a white blouse. She spoke rough English and addressed me by my last name. After introducing herself, she turned to Victoria and the two spoke for some time. I was tired and wanted to sleep. Finally there was a pause in the conversation. Mrs. Zhang turned to me. “
Hao de
,” she said and paused. I had learned in the few lessons I had taken with a tutor before I left that
hao
meant good or okay. “Okay,” she said in English. “We go now.”

She led us to the elevator and told us that their apartment was on the sixteenth floor. On the elevator wall I saw a list of elevator rules written in Chinese and English. They were fairly standard, except for rule number two: “
2. PLEASE DO NOT PLAYING AND GAMBOLING IN THE ELEVATORS
.” I smiled at the thought of four elderly Chinese men hunched over a smoky card table in the center of a crowded elevator. I wondered what the real story was behind that rule.

The elevator opened onto an empty gray corridor. At the end was a bright red door with a huge, golden door-knocker. A savage-looking animal, a dragon or a lion perhaps, glared back
at me, its teeth gripped tight around the golden ring that hung from its mouth. Mrs. Zhang ignored the knocker and pressed an intercom to the side of the door.

I heard the sound of several locks being undone before the door swung inward. A small woman who looked to be in her forties or fifties peeked her head around the door. Mrs. Zhang shooed her out of the way and walked into the apartment. Victoria and I followed, but the driver hung back in the hallway with my bags. Mrs. Zhang took her shoes off and handed them to the woman who had just opened the door. The woman, whom I took to be a maid, was holding three pairs of slippers, the cheap, thin kind you find in hotel rooms. I saw that Victoria was now also wearing the slippers, and I noticed that Mrs. Zhang was staring at my shoes. I took them off and took the last pair of slippers from the maid. They were too small, and my heels stuck out far beyond the end of the soles.

Mrs. Zhang gave Victoria and me a quick tour of their home. She explained that they had bought three apartments and connected them. First she led us through two sparsely furnished living rooms, which she said they used to receive guests. The walls were painted white and were bare except for several large and elaborate paintings of flowers and mountainous landscapes. The chairs in the dining room had a shiny gloss to them, and the large sofas that sat in front of the television had a plastic quality that made them look unnaturally clean. She showed me her family's living quarters. I was surprised to find a European-style four-poster bed in the master bedroom and a large bathtub in the middle of the room. The tub was white and had gold taps in the shape of swans. Mrs. Zhang smiled and nodded her head when
Victoria told her how beautiful the room was. I could tell by Victoria's reaction that she was overwhelmed by the opulence and size of this apartment.

Several months later, Victoria told me that she and her husband had been saving up for several years to have enough cash to buy their own apartment. She told me that in Beijing, it had become common for government officials and businessmen to launder their “gray money,” money that came from bribes and corrupt deals, by buying second and third apartments in cash. The practice had artificially inflated the housing market to the point where just finding a place for herself and her husband had become extremely difficult. The luxurious bathtub placed in the middle of the gigantic bathroom was an extravagance she would never have even contemplated.

Mrs. Zhang brought us back to the dining area where a maid served tea. She passed around a bowl of small packages of nuts. I took a sip of the tea. It was green and tasted like bitter licorice.

“You don't like?” Mrs. Zhang laughed at my expression.

“No, no, it's good,” I said. I raised the cup to my mouth and pretended to drink.

“This is called Long-Jing tea, from Hangzhou. Very expensive,” she said.

I noticed a bowl of sugar packets on the table, and I picked up several, emptying three into my tea. Mrs. Zhang, who had been talking to Victoria, looked back to me and saw what I was doing. “Ah!” she exclaimed. “No, no. For coffee. Okay, no matter.” I raised the tea to my lips again and took a small sip. It was better.

Mrs. Zhang explained that for security reasons, I must always wait in the building for Victoria. Under no circumstances was I ever to leave unescorted. “Not safe,” she said. She also said
they had only one key to their apartment. It stayed with their live-in security guard. The key never left the house unless they were all going on vacation, in which case Mr. Zhang kept it. “They can make a copy,” she explained. “So we only have one key.” She never did explain who “they” were. Mrs. Zhang told Victoria that we were to use one of their four drivers. Driver Wu would be free to take me to school in the morning and tennis in the afternoon. She said that she had made these arrangements with my father and that these instructions were not to be modified in any way.

In all the months I lived in Beijing, I never heard or read about any kidnappings and robberies, but I didn't know if that was because they did not happen or because they were not reported. I wondered if my father had arranged all of these precautions to protect me or to supervise me.

I finished the remainder of my tea and declined a second serving. Mrs. Zhang then clapped her hands, and a servant appeared. She rattled off something in Chinese, and the servant disappeared only to return a few minutes later with two small children. Due to the One Child Policy, it was unusual for a Chinese family to have more than one child. The Zhangs had lived in Hong Kong, I suspected, so they could have more children, and had just moved back to Beijing because, as Mr. Zhang had told my father, the children's written Chinese was very poor. They had attended the American International School in Hong Kong, where half the classes were in English, half in Mandarin. Ten-year-old David arrived holding a Nintendo DS in front of him as if it were a steering wheel. Mrs. Zhang laughed that David was never without his Nintendo. He stood motionless staring at the tiny screen in front of him until his mother said something to
him that sounded like a reprimand. He looked up and waved a hand. “Hi,” he said.

“Okay, you two talk now, yes?” Mrs. Zhang said. It was a command, not a question. David clearly resented the interruption from his video game, and he gazed at me sullenly. There was an awkward silence. Exhausted from my flight and wanting only to lie down, I was not thrilled by the prospect of having to struggle in conversation with a grumpy ten-year-old.

“David,” Mrs. Zhang said sharply. Her tone got his attention. “Chase plays tennis, very good,” she turned to me. “Yes. David likes to play tennis, too.”

“Do you play a lot of tennis?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes,” he said.

“How about soccer?”

David shrugged again and did not answer. Mrs. Zhang hid her irritation with a laugh. “David plays too many computer games. I hope you will inspire him to play sports,” Mrs. Zhang said.

David's six-year-old sister, Lily, was dressed in a pink Disney princess outfit and was hiding behind her nanny. Victoria knelt down to say hello, but Lily hid her face in the back of her nanny's leg. Mrs. Zhang told Lily to speak, but she just burrowed her face deeper into the folds of her nanny's skirt. Finally a small hand stretched out from behind the nanny and waved a timid hello.