Repeat After Me (6 page)

Julia Too, who has grown up in Beijing and is stunningly bilingual, shares my love of Chinglish, especially of the effortful translation variety. When she and I rode down from our apartment on the twenty-seventh floor of Luscious Gardens this morning, our building management had posted the following notice on a bulletin board facing the elevators:
“Comply with Public Morality; Strictly prohibit casting articles from high. On October 15, a flaming dog-end was flung from upstairs and burned a fabric chair. It happened that the resident of the chair did not sit in the chair when the dog-end fell so a more hated outcome was avoided. But that heinous activity reminds the danger of casting fireous dog-ends from high. Really, we have
warned this many times already. Kindly hope those individuals take others’ safety into account. Stop bad bombarding behavior
.”

Bad bombarding behavior! Someone had thrown a cigarette butt out the window. Julia Too immediately tore down the notice and tucked it into her Chinglish notebook. I have helped her be balanced by providing terrible Chinese for the collection, including Julia Too’s most beloved of my gaffes, when I said,
Wo ye yao
, or “My leaves are shaking,” instead of “I’d also like one,” in reference to a bottle of mineral water. My personal favorite was thanking a Chinese colleague for inviting me to
ta ma de
birthday, his “mother fucking birthday party” instead of his “mother’s birthday party.” Who knew that pairing up a possessive with a mother equals “mother fucking”?

I recently heard Julia Too say innocently to the mother of one of her Chinese friends, “My mom speaks a little Chinese.” Julia Too is so fluent that to her, I am the kind of person who uses expressions like “casting fireous dog-ends from high” in Chinese.

Da Ge tried teaching me to speak the year we knew each other, but I didn’t actually learn anything until I arrived in Beijing in 1994 and hired Teacher Hao, a gray-plumed, retired professor who tutors me. Gray hair is unusual here, and Teacher Hao wears his shiny mop like a peacock’s tail. He’s shy about everything except his fabulous do and my unacceptable pronunciation. In these two areas, he’s on fire.

We talk almost exclusively about Tang poetry and Julia Too, conversations that require me to use the word “daughter,” which, after eight years of trying, I apparently still can’t pronounce properly.

“My daughter has a—” I said yesterday.

“
Nu’er
,” he said. “Daughter.”

“
Nu’er
.”

“No!
Nu’er
.” He peered into my mouth, as if he’d find some kind of mechanical problem in there, which I hoped he would. Finding nothing in the physiology of a foreigner that should excuse such pronunciation, he sighed. “
Xing
,” he said, okay, go on.

“My daughter has a new friend, whose main interests are boys and U.S. culture.”

“Is your
nu’er
also interested in such things?”

“Well, she’s at a disadvantage.”

“Why?”

“Phoebe lived in the U.S. more recently.”

As I explained to Teacher Hao, Phoebe has a superior grasp of hip and all-important American cultural touch-stones, and for some reason, knowing about American culture and knowing about boys are related. She who knows the most about one is guaranteed to know the most about the other.

“Maybe your daughter should spend more of her time with the daughter of Xiao Wang, your Chinese friend?” I thought of Teacher Hao’s daughter, a sixteen-year-old who has been forbidden to do anything but study since the moment she was born. The one time I met her, at a dinner so socially awkward I had to sneak beta blockers in the bathroom, she was practically wearing a burlap sack. I don’t like designer jeans or pointy shoes on little girls—too much fashion screams creepy pageant, but there’s a delicate balance somewhere. Teacher Hao’s daughter wants to study abroad and will have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other applicants. What time does that leave for lip gloss, or for dating?

“Julia Too and Lili do spend a lot of time together,” I said, defensively. “But she needs to have more than one friend.” I was annoyed by the implication, even though I had
provoked it and agreed that it was probably true, that a Chinese friend would be a better influence than an American one. “Kids need spare time, hobbies, leisure. Or it stunts their creative growth.”

“Maybe American friends are just heavier influences than Chinese ones,” he said.

“Not in my life,” I said. I laughed, but Teacher Hao gave me a stern look.

“Maybe she should go to a Chinese school.”

I rolled my eyes, and he cracked a smile. “Then, as you like to say about my daughter, she’ll have no time for friends,” he said. I took the joke as a gesture of camaraderie, since Teacher Hao does not find my sense of humor funny. Perhaps embarrassed, he promptly changed the subject to a poem about sailing a river of yellow flowers and retreated into the details of its lines.

After my lesson, Julia Too and I rode up Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, its sidewalk tiles clattering beneath our wheels, light rising up from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The city smelled like urban autumn, its usual curtain of coal and restaurant smoke hanging above us, garlic and meat cooking, always the faint scent of fresh-poured pavement underneath. At night, I can’t imagine ever leaving Beijing. But sometimes during the day I wonder whether Julia Too will grow up lost.

She seems to be doing okay. Phoebe came over last night, and they made spy notebooks, which they mysteriously call “goggies.” They’re fourteen pages each, with pouches for erasers, pencils, and extra note cards. Julia Too has been fascinated with spying since 9/11 happened last year, deciding that she could make herself useful by collecting information. When I asked, “Useful to whom?” she rolled her eyes. I don’t think her intentions are patriotic, but I’m not certain. She’s going to New York to stay with my mother and her
husband, Jack, over Christmas. Maybe this is her way of preparing.

By this morning, she and Phoebe complained to me that I was too boring a subject for their spying, so we rode to the China World Hotel to ice-skate. Phoebe sat on the back of Julia Too’s bike, and they giggled while I wondered if this was something Phoebe’s mother, Anne, would allow. There was more giggling in the locker room, while they tried to figure out how they would glide around the rink, overhear juicy conversations, and then record them in their “goggies” without falling or drawing attention to themselves. Right before they went out on the ice, they put on lipstick (which Phoebe had brought). Lipstick. I don’t even know what to think of this development for Julia Too. I sat on a bench and graded
Grapes of Wrath
papers while they twirled and slipped across the rink. I was more than halfway through the set when Anne arrived. “How are they?” she asked.

“Not a good batch,” I said. “But some had thesis statements, so that was encouraging.”

“I meant the girls.” She glanced nervously at the rink.

“Oh, of course.”

“Was Phoebe well behaved?” I followed her gaze to Phoebe and Julia Too, who were holding hands and skating in a straight, white line. Ice shaved into curls around the sides of their blades.

“Phoebe’s always lovely, Anne. She’s welcome anytime.”

“Thank you. GB is such a good environment for them, don’t you think?”

I sighed. Anne and I have had this conversation before. Whenever we talk, I’m re-disappointed that Americans are not effortlessly accessible to one another. “Especially your math program,” she was saying. “Phoebe wasn’t learning anything like algebra at her school in Michigan, and that was a private school too!”

“Yeah. International private school math programs are good compared to their domestic counterparts,” I said. I considered gnawing my leg off to escape the rest of the conversation. “Julia, sweetie!” I shouted across the rink. “Put your shoes on—we have to meet Old Chen!” She nodded, gliding toward the exit.

Xiao Wang loves to remind me that the Chinese government recognizes Jews as an official Chinese ethnic group. So maybe I’m more Jewish or Chinese than American, because American strangers now seem especially strange. Although I was never much of a friend maker, even in New York. Julia Too takes after my mother in this regard, thankfully. She and Phoebe came dancing out of the locker room, their faces flushed from the cold rink and an interaction they’d had with some hockey-playing boys. Fodder for the goggies, I hoped. We waved Anne and Phoebe into their car-with-driver, and they headed for a gated neighborhood out in the suburb of Tong Xian, probably in a villa with at least one of the words “Jade,” “Legend,” or “Dragon” in its name. Anne and Phoebe are bona fide expatriates. Phoebe has seen recent movie releases that were not taped in the theater and full of people leaping up to get more popcorn in the middle of the show. She does not ride her bike everywhere in Beijing or snack on chicken feet at the beach, like Julia Too and I do.

Julia Too and I are fake expats, somewhere between imports and locals. We eat two-dollar bowls of noodles from street stands, have no maid, and wear knockoff clothes from the silk market. At the same time, we live in a temperate apartment with HBO, so I don’t know how much authenticity we can actually claim; these things are all relative.

Old Chen was waiting in the Luscious Garden parking lot for our Saturday afternoon dumpling date. We knew him even through the tinted windows of his black sedan. As soon as Julia Too pedaled into sight, the old man burst out of his
car, and she leapt off her bike, tossed it into the rack, and ran to greet him. I watched her, my lovely, gangly string bean of a girl, throw her arms around his formal neck. They greeted each other in Chinese, and he scooped her up and then nodded in a shy way in my direction. I blew him a kiss. The driver opened the trunk, and Old Chen and Julia Too went digging in there together. He had brought a kite for her, a string of red butterflies they spent the rest of the day teaching to fly.

     
November 1989, New York, NY

Dear Teacher,

You say we should write about our “family history.” Mine are like this. My father is man who prefer to be the head of chicken than tail of ox. But maybe that because he know if you are first head of chicken then you can become head of ox. My father speak precision English. He study himself every morning maybe for hours. He say China will open some day. We will need to speak it. He try to teach me and even I try not to learn I can’t help learn some of his perfect English.

My father became rich. He have big black car with black window and big hands and big house and big plan I will be the management of a company. My mother will hate this if she know. She already hate my father before, even hate the way the world became. So she self-kills in 1982. Mao is dead. She know my father will never do the thing they promise each other to do. Because my father is cynic but my mother not. And he is right. The revolution fail. And many people regret later, especially my mother who believe in it so much. Because even she would realize what she do is not good, that it don’t work out so the country sinking. This become impossible situation for her. My mother is kind of person who care about the truth. She want to find the truth no matter it’s good news for her or not. But she cannot even do that. She is pretty and extravagant when she swallow many medication. When I find her, she was already dead in the bedroom. Before that happen, she cleaned up and made some food for me.

Da Ge

I
BOUGHT MY
E
NGLISH-TO
-C
HINESE DICTIONARY THE DAY
I read about Da Ge’s mother’s suicide. I still have the plastic book, with its dirty red cover and shredded pages. Xiao Wang calls it the Aysha primer, because it’s red and I carry it with me like a believer.

The first words I ever looked up in Chinese were “Da” and “Ge.” I was sitting in my thimble-sized living room on 115th with his desperate essay. The Chinese section was alphabetized easily. I found
da
, which had dozens of meanings, including “big, great, and beat (as in hit, with a stick or fist).”
Ge
meant “cut off, lyric, spear, place, knot.” I could not tell then what they mean when put together: big brother.