The Foremost Good Fortune (23 page)

I can do it this way. I don’t blame anyone for not mouthing the word out loud. No one on this soccer field knows me well. I nod my head. I say,
Yeah, thanks, I’m okay
. They all go back to watching the game, and I stand there wondering why it feels like a train has just run over me. When I get home, Mao Ayi has left a bowl full of tomato and egg noodle soup on the stove. It’s delicious. I watch the boys eat dinner but my mind has gone away. Tony comes home, and I tell the boys, “Mommy’s not feeling well tonight.” I go lie down in my bed and spend the next three hours wondering what caused my cancer.

It’s a dark hole I slip into more and more. And hey—I’m done with
the treatment. I should be doing cartwheels. So why am I not floating on air? I think about the Camel Lights I smoked in high school. Did
they
cause my cancer? It’s dangerous territory. And what about fruit? What about the apples and bananas I should have eaten more of? And then there are the cruciferous vegetables. What about red bell peppers?

On Saturday morning I decide the answer is to pack up the minivan and head to the Great Wall. We need to get out of the city and hike on top of something bigger than us—a wall that took millions of people thousands of years to build, one that stretches across China four thousand miles. When we arrive in Mutianyu it’s still morning, and we rent an old house for the night from an American man and his Chinese wife.

The village is a cluster of a hundred or so squat brick homes built along the mountainside. A dry patchwork of terraced cornfields surrounds the houses, and rows of chestnut trees. The house we rent has a stone roof and elaborate wooden latticework that covers the glass windows. Double doors painted Chinese red lead to a cement courtyard, where we can stand and look up to the watchtowers on the wall. It’s good to be out of the city. Aidan and Thorne climb a persimmon tree and holler down. Tony takes pictures of the boys hanging from their knees and then cuts open a persimmon with his jackknife to see the pale meat.

The entrance to the wall is a twenty-minute hike up the mountain from the house. The boys wear Red Sox hats and carry backpacks with water bottles. Tony keeps the black Nikon around his neck. We pass the woman walking her camel. I saw her the last time we were here. The camel looks old and dirty and grumpy. The woman parks him up at the ticket entrance and charges people ten kuai to sit on him.

It’s been one year. The wall seems smaller now, less intimidating, like so many things do in China the second time. The sky is blue, and we can see a series of dark green mountain peaks that stretch in either direction for miles. A uniformed guard asks if he can have his picture taken with Thorne because of his straw-colored hair. Aidan asks to buy a Coke from a man selling them in one of the watchtowers. Tony and I say no to Coke on the Great Wall. But we cave in to gum. It’s Doublemint, and the boys each buy a pack for three yuan. Down below us are miles and
miles of forest. I think I can see the top of our rented house. Thorne tells us to look at the moon. “It’s still full,” he yells. I take Tony’s camera from him and walk toward my children.

“Aidan,” I say. “Lean in toward your brother.” Then I snap the picture of both boys together looking out over the edge of the world. It’s difficult on some days to believe that cancer infiltrated our family planetary system—our sun and moon and stars. But each of us is different for that now. We’ve survived something together.

Tony takes a sip of water and tells the boys that thousands of Mongols used to attack the wall on horses. “They’d gallop to the edge,” he says, “and then the Chinese guards would push them back with swords and bows and arrows.” Aidan and Thorne love this part.

“Don’t forget cannons, Daddy,” Thorne says. “The Chinese army used cannons.” At some point the Chinese installed small iron cannons along the sides of the wall. Thorne sits on one that’s turned to rust. Then he starts calling out, “Genghis Khan, where are you?!”

What I’m trying to do here on this wall is get some traction. I met a psychologist at a dinner last summer who told me it takes most of her cancer patients five years to come to grips with their diagnosis. I’m beginning to understand what she meant. I pull my water bottle from my backpack. My body now feels like a molecular-cellular mystery to me. Part of some great, biological fuckup. I’m beginning to see that cancer is for life. You beat it back with surgeries and drugs. You beat it with a stick if you have one. You trick it. But even then you’re in some kind of dialogue with it. Because you never want cancer to surprise you as badly as it did the first time. We’ve made it to the other side for now. The four of us are standing on the Great Wall to prove it.

The village of Xiaolumian lies one valley over from Mutianyu, and the next morning we wake up at the rented house and hike over. There’s a hand-drawn map that says we’re supposed to cut through a field of pear trees, then after the second bend in the road we should start looking for a pig farm. We head down the mountain this time. Thorne leads and Aidan scrambles to stay in second place. Tony follows Aidan and tries to keep him from falling off the side of the steep path. The boys are singing a song about buying Chinese sweets. They like to walk in the woods.

We hike until the path stops in the middle of the orchard. The map says nothing from here. Thorne closes his eyes and points left. Left leads to a small enclosed valley with no way out except to retrace our steps. We shuffle our way down the path to the split again and head right this time. I scan the hills for signs of the pig farm, but I’ve never seen a pig farm before, so I don’t know what to look for.

I’ve been told that almost every house in a Chinese village has a sow. There are cornfields here, too, and more chestnut trees dotted with green, hairy shells. In one week the farmers will close these paths and carry ladders into the trees to harvest the nuts. We hike the next twenty minutes over the hill and end up in the backyard of someone’s falling-down farmhouse. I’m thinking about millions of Chinese pigs and how I never understood the numbers before, when Thorne yells that he can hear animals grunting. The path cuts through a side yard past five pink sows in concrete stalls. They’re the most enormous pigs I’ve ever seen—heavy and unmoving while dozens of piglets root underneath for milk.

There’s also a handful of chickens eating seeds at a wooden trough. More chickens. Thorne is scared and runs back to hold my hand. But Aidan charges ahead and the birds squawk at him and flutter in the dirt and I hope he won’t reach out and grab one. A Chinese boy opens a red metal door and peeks his head out of the farmhouse. I smile. He smiles back and quickly closes the door. Tony pulls the hand-drawn map out of his pocket. The arrow says to follow the path to the main road, which leads to the village center.

Xiaolumian doesn’t have the air of impoverishment of some villages closer to the city—or the smell of being forgotten. Bright red flowers have been planted along the sides of the road. Xiaolumian is the county seat of the local Communist Party. “A model village” is what the sign says in Chinese when we come to the plaza. There’s a group of white-haired men gambling with cards at a square concrete table near the exercise yard. It’s the blue machinery I’ve seen in Beijing: one low balance beam, a seesaw for building leg muscles, and a high span of monkey bars. Off to the right is what looks like Communist Party headquarters—a gray brick fortress in the middle of town, with a boulder taller than Thorne out front and the Communist sickle painted on it in red.

We sit down on the bench next to the exercise yard, and an old woman without any teeth comes toward me from an open doorway. She places her hand on my arm and fingers the bright green bracelets
I’m wearing—the bracelets I got with Lily in Wiscasset last summer. We bought them and then giant chocolate-chip cookies at the bakery next door. This was after too many hours looking at Andrew and Jamie Wyeth paintings in a refurbished white barn further north. The bracelets are made of recycled rubber, and all the money is said to go to the women in Mali who make them: twenty-five dollars for twenty-five bracelets.

It was the last day of my radiation, and we climbed inside Lily’s Subaru to put the bracelets on. Nothing about the summer had seemed funny to me until then: not the mastectomy. Not the odds on how long I’d live. But twenty-five green rubber bracelets is a lot on one arm, and halfway through, Lily and I began to laugh. I don’t know what Lily laughed about, but I laughed for how grateful I was for her and for what a relief it was to be with her, miles north of the radiation room.

The old woman is still holding my arm. She points to Thorne and Aidan where they stand on the balance beam counting out loud in Mandarin. “Whoever falls first loses,” Thorne says to his brother in Chinese. The woman tallies up the boys: “Yi ge erzi. Liang ge erzi.
One boy. Two boys
. Then she laughs and speaks quickly to Tony, who translates: “She says you should have another child. She says the boys will leave you, but girls will always stay and help.” I smile at the woman and hope she’ll go on her way, and when she does, Tony and I sit on the wooden bench and hold hands while the boys make it across the monkey bars.

Someone has painted a sign in white on the part of the mountain that sits under the wall. The Chinese characters spell out “Long live Chairman Mao,” which Tony reads to me over and over like he can’t believe it.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“It’s fresh paint,” Tony whispers.

“An eyesore.” I laugh. “Why are you whispering?”

“Because I think this town is a Communist hotbed. We wouldn’t want to screw up in this town.” The characters stretch across the whole left side of the mountain saddle. Later we learn that the mayor of Xiaolumian ordered the slogan, and that the mayor is, as another man in the village tells us, a Communist zealot. His village technically owns the part of the mountain the slogan’s written on. The mayor told the
town he only redid a sign that had already been painted up there, and that “Long live Chairman Mao” has sat on the mountainside for forty years while chestnut trees grew up around it. But that was then and this is now, and Mao is dead, and one of the Chinese men we meet back in Mutianyu later calls the new slogan an abomination.

That night, Tony and I and the boys have dinner outside a small wooden farmhouse in Xiaolumian. There are homemade noodles with eggplant sauce and peanuts and green onions on top. There’s rice wine and a dish Tony calls shredded chicken. Someone has strung white lights in the trees. Aidan announces halfway through the meal that he plans to get a PhD in rocket science, but only to pay the bills while he becomes a rad skateboarder. Thorne laughs and says, “You can’t be both a rocket scientist and a skateboarder.”

But Tony argues that of course you can be both. “You can always be both.” Then we hear thunder and lightning, and Aidan panics—screaming that he’s afraid of thunder. I tell him the storm will miss us, and I take him in my lap. But then the rain comes, and we put our chopsticks down and run for the farmhouse. Inside, there’s a kang and a circle of wooden chairs. A woman sets down a plate of sliced moon cakes on a table by the door—apricot, coconut, and red bean.

It rains harder now and thunder cracks over our heads. Each time the lightning flashes it feels dangerous and exciting. Tony stands in the open doorway watching the storm. The boys eat the moon cakes while three Chinese musicians come in from the rain and take seats next to us. One man carries an
erhu
, which looks like a long, thin fiddle with two strings. Another man has a
baosheng
—a metal gourd surrounded by thin bamboo pipes. The third man is the singer. He begins a strange-sounding song that rises and falls in a high-pitched, meandering way. Other people have run in here to stay dry, and we watch the musicians. There’s a passing moment when I feel lucky. And then the feeling goes.

But I appear to be a healthy mother with two boys in my lap eating red bean moon cake in the mountains of northeast China. What is true and what is not true in cancer and in China is always changing. I learn as I go. The singing ends unexpectedly, and the baosheng player rises to pour a small bit of water down the mouthpiece of the gourd. He shows the boys how it’s easier to blow air through the hole when it’s wet.

Then the rain slows and Tony runs outside to find a man who’ll
take us back to Mutianyu by car. We drive slowly because the wet tar is slippery and because hundreds of small toads have climbed onto the road. Aidan sees them in the headlights first—pale, rubbery toads hopping in the rain. He cries, “The toads. Look out for the toads! We will kill them.” And it’s true. We are driving over toads. But what can we do?

What I remember about toads is that they’re amphibians and there’s a time in their lives when they breathe both underwater and in the air. Our car keeps moving along, and toads keep hopping in front. It’s more than I can stomach—a mass killing of amphibians. So I say Chinese toads are smart enough to hop around our car wheels. Aidan is only five years old. I want to protect him. I don’t want any more talk of dying—not of toads or little boys or mommies. I say, “The toads will be okay,” and Aidan seems relieved. He nods at me and stares out the window solemnly.

When we get back to the rented house, the boys climb into the narrow beds, and I read them a Chinese folk tale called “The Goddess of the Moon.” There’s a daughter named Chang E in the story. Her father is the river god, and he sends her to live on the moon as punishment because she says out loud that she wants to live forever. When I come to this part of the fable, I wish I could take the whole thing back and start over with a new story.

Because this is not the Chinese folk tale we need tonight. What we need is a simple story about the good life here on earth. A fable about food, maybe. Something about a harvest and wild animals finding seeds to last through winter. Not a tale about more longing for immortality. Chang E’s husband becomes god of the sun so he can be closer to his wife. Then on the fifteenth day of each month, Chang E and her husband are allowed to visit each other on the moon, which is why the moon always shines brighter at mid-harvest. This is when Thorne announces that he, too, would like to live forever. I’m not surprised. I’ve seen this coming. He lies in bed next to me looking serious. He’s seven years old, and why wouldn’t he want immortality? Why wouldn’t he want to live forever? Or want me to?