Frozen Teardrop (17 page)

Since we were utterly exhausted mentally and physically, my coach took my mother, the secretary, and me back to our rooms to rest and settle in. Not more than five minutes after my mother and I sat on the beds, we broke down crying. The conditions were harsh. The rooms and the common areas were filthy. The food was different and interesting but I already missed the diet I had been on. The bed was so uncomfortable and hard. There was no television, no radio, and no privacy. We could not believe what we had gotten ourselves into. Again we were in a land far away with no familiar faces and we had to succumb to being total strangers. We felt like we were the only foreigners for miles and miles and we just cried. Even by the second night the secretary was crying for us. She asked us in bewilderment and confusion, “Why are you here?” For us it was just too drastic a change. Was skating worth it? Maybe it would build character? Maybe here we would learn the true necessities of life? Perhaps we would learn how little is needed to just live. Of course we stayed and we endured. I was a skater; I had to.

Just two months into our stay, my mother had to return to Alameda because our apartment lease was near its termination and it was time to clear things up. My poor mother was always cleaning up after me. She had had to do it all over the world for the family but usually with my father's company's help. Since we had left Japan she had been on her own cleaning up the mess her daughter had created in Toronto, then in Alameda and many more to come. I felt so guilty but my mother knew how important skating and training was to me and she never asked anything from me like that.

Not wanting to leave me all alone, my father came to replace my mother for a month or so. He enjoyed the hustle and bustle and he loved my new coach. I knew he loved him more than my mother did. They even went fishing together and had many evenings of enjoying beer and life stories together. My father did not speak Chinese and the coach spoke little English, but here language and culture did not matter and there were no boundaries. Two men of even more diverse backgrounds than could ever be described, bonded through life experiences. They saw something in each other that they found within themselves and my father trusted him immensely as a coach.

But even though my father had been in the military when younger he confessed he had never seen conditions like this. One time as my father and I were eating dinner in our dining area, a rat came over near our feet and just plopped down dead (hopefully from rat poison). The chef came to pick it up with his shovel and threw it out into the open space. That's all. No drama, no squeal, not even putting it in a trash can. And I have no idea for what other purpose he used that shovel and I don't want to know. But the others either did not see the dead rat in the middle of the campgrounds or it was just too common an incident to make a big deal out of it, but my father and I shuddered with disgust. We could not finish our meal.

There were cockroaches everywhere as well and they were humongous. The whole building was infested with them. They were behind all the mirrors in the common sink area. They were in our bedrooms. We used to skate late at night after the hockey players and sometimes came back to our rooms around 1:00a.m. The minute I switched on the light in my room I would see hundreds of them scramble to the cracks at the edges of the room. It would sicken me but I had no choice but to go to my bed to get some sleep.

One night I decided that I would take the hot kettle of water that we got every day and pour it on them as I switched on the light. I followed through with my plan and tried with all my might to kill them, but to absolutely no avail. I don't think I managed to even debilitate one of them! But what I did manage to do was enrage my mother. She was furious because I had wasted the only precious water we had on cockroaches. We never knew if the next day would bring more hot water and I apologized for my stupidity.

There was much more this new life brought to me. First I had to get used to the smell of smoke everywhere I went. All the coaches smoked. They even smoked at the ice rink while teaching. Admittedly it did in fact give a relaxed atmosphere to the otherwise fear-ridden air looming above the skaters at the ice rink. Then my mother had to wash our clothes in the sink with a washing board as they did in the “olden” days. She bought some soap, washed and scrubbed the clothes, and hung them up in our bedrooms. I felt like I had gone back in time and did not know what year it was anymore! Most of the people would go into the shower with their underwear and bras on and take them off and wash them as they washed themselves. It was incredibly hard to get used to the new life we were in, but once again it was better than any history lesson or book could teach me about life.

During the heat of the summer that I was there, for a few days the city had suddenly no water whatsoever. The temperatures were very, very high and no water for the whole city, meant literally no water. No water for showers, for the toilets, for brushing our teeth (my mother and I actually brushed our teeth with bottled water in fear of water borne diseases) and for the Zamboni to clean the ice surface. So we trained on ice for almost a week with not one Zamboni run. But the skaters still did quads left and right. Because it was so scorching hot and all the toilets had not been splashed down for days, the biggest problem was that the air started to reek of urine and feces. I even tried holding everything in and refused to use the bathroom for the duration, but no such luck. Mother Nature is stronger and I found myself scouring the grounds for toilets not yet used!

My mother thought we would have to leave the city but we somehow endured it like everyone else and about a week later the water came back on. It was truly disgusting to all the five senses. But we survived. All in the name of ice skating.

The food was not to my liking and my mother searched outside of the gates of the compound for a Western supermarket to buy me some essentials. She found one and bought fruit and boxes of cereal and cartons of milk for me. She even bought a hot-pot that cooked with electricity and she made me soups and stews.

When survival becomes your main concern, bonds become tighter and my mother and I bonded together. My mother still lashed out at times and I was still frightened of her, but the fact that she had to look out first for my safety and health overrode all else. Also my coach was so incredibly supportive of me that some pressure was lifted from my mother. My coach was with me twenty-four hours a day. He made sure when I went to sleep, when I woke up, what I ate and when, and since he only had one other student besides me, he was our personal coach at our service. He did off-ice and on-ice training with us, and the whole time we were on the ice it was lesson time. It was wonderful and amazing. I felt looked after. I felt his method was not erratic but studied and mastered. It was being in presence of truly a guru in his own right. My care from my coach helped my mother, and my coach made sure my mother did not beat me as much anymore. His other male student and I bonded and we shared great experiences with each other. It was wonderful to train with him and laughter and smiles conquered the training sessions.

This coach was definitely different from any I had before. For the first time in my life I felt like my coach really cared for me. He was calm and that is what I needed. I did not need anyone pushing me. For the first time I felt my coach actually understood me. He saw right away that I always trained, worked, and tried way too hard. Where all my other coaches had always pushed me far beyond my limits, he actually saw that for me to do well he would have to hold me back and tell me repeatedly not to do so much.

He started off with healing my injuries. He had the acupuncturist and massage therapist from the team come to my room everyday to treat me. My coach made me herbal baths to soak my feet in and herbal medicine drinks that I had to swallow by holding my breath and my nose since the smell and taste was indescribably horrid. Somehow, like never before, it all worked wonders. My injuries truly subsided and I started to get my strength back.

However, during the time of less exercise I had gained a little more weight and it looked like puberty would soon start for me. It was the summer of 1998 and I was nineteen years old now. Although still flat-chested I was getting some curves. Again, my coach did not like this and maybe if we had spoken up about my never having had my period and that it was not healthy for me to lose weight, he would have understood and given me time. But we did not, and he wanted me to lose the little excess weight I had. My mother was actually furious at him for telling me to lose weight. She had suffered through my sister being anorexic and she could not handle it again. So to her dislike, I went on a strict and balanced but minimal diet. I chewed gum all day so that I would not eat and I lost the weight fairly quickly. I always did whatever someone told me to do since I would just do it without thinking it through. I lost the onset of puberty and my body went back to looking like a boy. Hormonally I was not balanced and I was to suffer the consequences of this later on.

Since Harbin was the home to all the athletes at the training center, their parents visited often and brought food for their children and kindly brought us some as well. I was speaking pretty well in Chinese by then and had fun conversations with my teammates. The Chinese invited us much more into their culture than the Japanese had done. On the weekends after the morning practice on Saturday the athletes went back to their parents' home and returned to camp on Monday mornings. Since my mother and I had no other home but the campgrounds, in the beginning we just stayed there on the weekends too. It was desolate, lonely, intolerably quiet, and you would hear the uninvited cockroaches scurrying! The kitchen would of course be closed as well.

During the week, when I rested in between practices, my mother ventured off to explore the city. She found a beautiful hotel, the best in Harbin, and some days we would go and have a proper (for us) dinner, and it just was so amazing. To eat with a knife and fork and have a piece of steak melt in your mouth was just heaven. It felt like a dinner fit for a queen after eating at the cafeteria. I wouldn't want to leave the comfort of the hotel. To come from nothing and then have a dinner on a nice plate in a clean dining room felt incredibly indulgent. The contrast could be felt in every vein in the body. Even the sight of a few foreigners here and there and to hear some English being spoken brought us some sort of familiarity.

My mother had a marvelous idea! She decided she would treat herself and me to weekends at the hotel! So every Saturday afternoon we packed an overnight bag and went to the hotel. Ah, you don't know how good the clean sheets and the big bed with the bouncy mattress felt, and oh, the bathroom was just marvelous. I never appreciated all these daily things as much as at those times. I would soak in the bathtub for hours scrubbing off all the dirt from camp. I would lie in bed cuddled in the clean white sheets all afternoon watching television, and we would just order room service. This was the life! It wasn't glamorous at all but after camp, oh my goodness, it felt glamorous! We felt like queens.

On Sundays we had a big brunch and would stack away a few breads in our pockets for the next week. Sunday afternoon, like good soldiers, we would be back on the campgrounds and back to Chinese reality. At least now the weekends were something to look forward to and made the week more bearable. It was like a special treat!

The city outside the grounds was stimulating to say the least, in many different ways. Huge trash bins circled the gates and the trash was overflowing and had a horrendous stench to it. There was a huge market with a tent above it that sold everything you can imagine for very little. My parents and I would explore it often and have a blast. We used to buy tons of these colorful hacki-sacks that had a metal base and feathered heads. My teammates and I would play with them for hours. One time the sellers even wanted to buy my father's pants off of him! There were bicycles and people everywhere. I have never seen that many people, not even in Tokyo. Or maybe I have, but in Tokyo everyone walks, and goes in the same direction in his or her own little bubble. It seems cold and distant, everyone camouflaged as if they all look the same. In China everyone was going everywhere in no order or manner, everyone pushing each other out of their way. There were barbers lined up on the street giving haircuts. It was alive and there was a sense of urgency in the air that all must keep on moving. Nothing must ever come to a halt. It was bustling with excitement.

My coach had seen me compete and train before, so he knew what I was all about. The first few days I was getting back on the ice were terrible. I was still healing from my injuries and I wasn't landing any of my triples, but I was doing them over and over again. After studying me for a few days he came to a conclusion. It was July by now and he told my mother and me that he would allow me to do only doubles for three months! Not one triple. He said my timing, rhythm, and coordination were completely off, and my falling repeatedly and landing one out of ten jumps was not going to do me any good. He said that we would see that after three months, when my doubles were performed to perfection, I would land all the five triples in just one day. My mother and I were dumbfounded. We couldn't fathom not working like a donkey, even if that meant falling over and over again. But I trusted this coach more than I ever had, and to finally have a coach that understood, and for someone to finally step up to my defense and not push me, was such a God-given gift that I knew I needed to follow his teachings. It was pleasing to me that he calmed down my mother; it wasn't my job anymore. He took care of everything. Everyone was living so close together that it was impossible for my mother to lash out. Since she and I were tightly watched, she no longer had the freedom she had previously. It was so good for both of us. My father having so much trust in this coach also helped my mother to relax. It started to feel like my skating life might finally come together in peace at last.