The Foremost Good Fortune (28 page)

Homework

I’m standing on a small patch of cement at the bus stop again, keeping my head down to avoid the bracing November wind. Our friend Ken is there—he’s the father of Eric, the sweet boy who first asked Thorne to sit with him on the bus. Ken waves and says, “I don’t think I’ll ever be Chinese.” I nod and try to understand what he means because to me Ken
looks
so Chinese. He says, “I’ve been talking in Mandarin all day at a work seminar, and my face hurts.”

Ken and his wife, Vanessa, are a fast lesson in cultural nuance for me. They sound Chinese and speak it to each other on the phone whenever I overhear them. But Vanessa is Taiwanese, not Chinese, and this is a crucial distinction. Ken moved to Long Island from Taiwan when he was twelve. He’s a hard-core Yankee fan who often seems more confused by China’s byzantine rules than I do. I keep trying to remember that Ken is watching how things are done here just as closely as I am.

Dawn is also at the bus stop. She’s the Chinese Irish woman who warned me to eat organic food last year when I told her I had cancer. She doesn’t talk to me much. I’m not sure why, and I try not to think she’s avoiding me. “We never see you anymore,” I say and stand next to her.

She seems hurried. “It’s because we have homework every day. No more playing,” she says. Her children are five and three. “Every day it’s homework. But Henry likes it,” she points at her son. He’s small for a five-year-old and wears an eye patch. “But it’s hard on me. Because I have to do the homework with him.”

For some reason I’m still programmed to initiate small talk with people about subjects I’m not interested in. This is another habit I am trying to break in China. I don’t want to talk about homework for five-year-olds.
I don’t believe in it. I want to go home and make oatmeal for breakfast and click on “Real Clear Politics” to see if Obama’s seven-point national lead is holding.

“So much homework,” Dawn says. “Sometimes two hours.” I think I detect a hint of pride in Dawn’s voice. People get pretty worked up about homework in this city. A lot of the moms never think their kids have enough of it.

“What school do the kids go to again? I forget,” I ask Dawn.

“Yew Chung,” she says.

“Oh, right,” I say. “I’ve heard it’s a hard school. It’s Chinese, right?”

I’m thinking about how Thorne and Aidan’s school has clear homework parameters: fifteen minutes a night for first graders, twenty minutes for second graders.

“Yew Chung is an international school,” Dawn says to Ken and me. “They have testing.”

There’s another woman at the bus stop—a Chinese American mother from New York City. I wave to her as she pushes her one-year-old home in the stroller. She told me last week that she pulled her six-year-old daughter, Autumn, from the American school in the suburbs. “They weren’t doing enough learning,” she explained. “They were playing too much.”

Flora is also at the bus stop. She asks me what Aidan does after school. Her English is tricky to decipher, but I know she understands everything I say. “Aidan plays with me after school,” I say. “Eight hours is a long day for a five-year-old. He’s tired.”

“What time,” she asks, “do the boys go to bed?”

“Early,” I say. I know she’ll think I’m crazy, because every Chinese mother I’ve had this conversation with thinks my kids go to bed scandalously early. “Seven thirty,” I add, and wait for her surprise. The Chinese kids here tend to go to bed late, and they’re often asleep on the bus in the afternoons when it pulls in. It’s hard to wake up from a deep sleep on a school bus at four in the afternoon. It tends to involve a lot of crying.

“Seven thirty?” Flora says and opens her eyes up wide. “Very, very early.”

“And the girls?” I ask. “What time?” As far as I can remember, Maggie is nine and Samantha is six.

“Nine thirty or ten,” Flora says.

It is my turn for surprise. “Aren’t they tired?” I ask. “What time do they get up?”

“I have to wake them,” Flora explains. “Every morning I have to shake them.”

“What,” I wonder out loud, “do they do all night until nine thirty?”

“They eat and do homework and then they pray.”

Flora is more religious than I thought. They have family prayer after dinner? Flora goes on, “On the weekends there is no homework. The girls pray all day. Pray and pray and eat. Sometimes I tell Maggie she is like a pig. All she does is pray and sleep.”

Surely the girls are not that religious? Then I realize this must be a case of the missing
l
in Mandarin.
Play and sleep
. That’s what Flora is trying to say. The girls are playing every night before bed. Finally another family that is having a little fun.

On Sunday, Sabrina and Nick come for lunch. I haven’t seen Sabrina since we took the kids horseback riding. Nick is still living in Hong Kong, commuting back to Beijing every weekend. We sit down to a buffet of cold cuts. Today was the first time sliced turkey was for sale at April Gourmet. I bought some, plus mozzarella cheese and an avocado and a baguette. It cost a small fortune to put on this Americanized version of a French lunch in Beijing. The avocado was five U.S. dollars. The cheese cost seven. I pass the tomatoes to Tony, who smiles. The tomatoes are from China and were cheap.

Nick says Sabrina is overscheduling their children. It’s part of an ongoing feud. “It’s the Chinese way,” he says. “She works the kids into the ground.”

She tries to explain why her daughter, Rachel, has three hours of homework each day. What I know is that Sabrina has her kids in piano class at 9:00 a.m. on Saturdays. Then she has them in math tutoring, English-speaking class, or Chinese writing class every day after school. “She’s behind,” Sabrina announces, then reaches for the cheese. “Rachel is way behind in Chinese.” This is difficult for foreigners like me to understand. How could Rachel be behind in Chinese? She speaks Mandarin fluently.

But the Chinese parents need more than that. Understandably, they
need their kids to write the thousands of Chinese characters fluently. I try not to take sides at lunch. I say, “Our kids are just too tired for tutoring after school.”

Sabrina asks Tony if the boys use the playground outside every day. “Most days,” he says and looks at me and smiles.

“While the Korean and Chinese children are doing their homework.” She laughs.

I’m getting paranoid. Because then I say, “Well, they don’t play
every
day. Thorne does his homework before bedtime, and sometimes we have special drawing time together.”

Sabrina asks if I have any after-school tutors for math and reading. It’s never occurred to me. “Not just now,” I say and try to change the subject.

“It must not be that interesting for your kids here,” Sabrina adds. I don’t understand what she means. “They already speak English, and that’s what everyone is trying to learn here.”

“Oh no,” I say. “Aidan and Thorne are learning Chinese. They like learning Chinese. It is very interesting to live here. Every day they write and speak Chinese.”

“Really?” She asks. “How is that?”

“It’s Tony,” I explain. “He speaks and writes Mandarin. He makes it fun for the kids.”

“No Chinese tutor?” Sabrina asks.

“No tutor.”

Foreign Intelligence

Today is November 4 in China. I go to a treadmill at the gym and turn on CNN on the small attached TV. We’re twelve hours ahead of the States, so the voting hasn’t begun yet in Maine. Obama has opened up a twelve-point national lead, but some state races have gotten closer in the last day. Marcus stands next to the TV screen and watches with me while I run. He says, “Obama will win today. It is historic. A black man winning your presidency. He is very dark.”

“I know. I know.” I can’t think of what else to say. I’m too nervous. When I’ve done my ten-minute warmup, Marcus motions toward the abs curl. I hate this machine more than the others. I’ve never had strong abdominal muscles and I do not see the need to start trying now. Marcus begins to ask me a question about Obama, but he can’t come up with the words he wants in English. He gets out his cell phone and looks up the Chinese. Then he reads the translation to himself. “Susan,” he says, “are you in Obama’s
political party
?”

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

“Oh.” Marcus smiles. He’s impressed in some way I cannot understand. Then I realize we’re having one of our misunderstandings.

“But Marcus,” I say, “our political parties in the United States are not like yours. Anybody can be in a political party. You get to choose which one you want and then you’re in.”

“Really?” He seems shocked.

“There are no interviews. No questions. You just register to vote and check the box that says Democrat or Republican or Independent or Green.”

“And then they decide whether or not to let you in?”

“No. You’re just in.” This will take a while to register for him.

“And you can change parties?” he asks me.

“Anytime. You can always change.”

“Wow.” He laughs. “Crazy.”

“But most people don’t change because they like their party. And they like the ideas behind their party. Tomorrow”—I’m panting now—“I’ll go to a big party at a hotel to watch the election results on TV.”

“We do not have anything like that,” Marcus says matter-of-factly. “You get to see if the man you like, Obama, will win. We don’t get to do that here.”

The next morning Tony and I drive to a fancy Chinese hotel ballroom where the American Chamber of Commerce has set up televisions that take up an entire three-story wall. It is 8:00 p.m. in the States and the polls are just closing. Tony and I and hundreds of other Americans eat fried rice and drink Sprite and cheer each state win. Elizabeth is here wearing a T-shirt that reads “Obama Mama.”

She’s been one of the lead Obama organizers in Beijing—staging voter registration cocktail parties for American expats and hosting house parties to listen to Obama’s China advisors on speakerphone. Many members of the Chinese media are here, taking notes on American democracy at work. The reporters surround Elizabeth, and she finds herself giving interviews all morning. I’m impressed by how calm she sounds. How reasonable. When CNN finally calls the election for Obama, everyone around me cries.

That night Tony and I go to a birthday party in the suburbs at Anna and Lars’s house. Anna is turning forty. She wears a long black Chinese tunic and asks everyone to serve themselves tapas in the kitchen. I think I have forgotten how to make small talk. I haven’t been out to a party like this since my surgery. I feel the social jitters—as if no one here will ever understand me, even if they did speak my language.

At first, everyone is chatting in Danish, including the German couple we know from the boys’ school.

“Congratulations on your new president,” a friend of Lars’s named Hendrick finally says to me in English.

Anna’s friend Mileana adds, “I am so relieved Obama has won.”

“Me too.” I smile back and can’t think of what else to say. I did very little personally to elect Barack Obama—I gave some money and wrote a few e-mails. But I can’t take responsibility for Obama’s election, much as I would like to. In the kitchen I thank Lars for the fact that he and his friends are speaking English to Tony and me, and he looks at me as if I’m crazy. “In Denmark we are a country of five million people, Susan,” he says. “We have no choice but to speak English.”

It’s a small party, maybe twenty people—men in sports shirts and women in short skirts or wide-legged pants. Lars keeps bringing out bottles of expensive European beer—Duvel and Chimay—and pouring them in Tony’s glass. Tony is uneasy. He whispers, “When you’re the only Americans at a party, you don’t want to be the first ones drinking the fancy beer.”

Anna lights three candles in the center of the table, and during dessert her friend Pia, who’s sitting next to me, takes one and pours liquid wax in her mouth. Everyone screams, but her husband just smiles from across the table. “She did this the night I met her, when we lived in Dubai,” he explains. Then we all wait for Pia to do the thing she does inside her mouth with the burning wax. It takes a long time. Everyone keeps talking in English, but I feel like I’m missing some key piece of information—some clue to the larger conversation. What is she doing with that wax in her mouth? Is this a Danish party trick? I can’t tell if the divide I feel is cultural, or if it’s something larger, to do with the boundary lines of cancer.

Then Pia’s husband says matter-of-factly, “She can also crush ice and spit it out into cups for cocktails.” It turns out that tonight Pia has poured too much wax and scorched the top of her tongue. The wax has to cool inside her mouth before she can make it into a cube. A man who says he operates a Danish shipping container company asks me, “Did you cry during Obama’s speech?”

“Yes, I did.” I smile, grateful for his curiosity. “It has been a good week to be American again,” I say then.

“Exactly right,” the man agrees. “After your long spate of imperialism.”

•  •  •

The next day I buy two air mattresses and carry them up to the apartment in their cardboard boxes. Lily will land in Beijing this afternoon with her husband and their two girls. I sit on our living room floor and plug the air pump into the wall. It sounds like a loud industrial sander. The mattresses are shiny blue, and when they come to life, they remind me of inflatable rafts. I try to imagine Lily materializing in the apartment and lying on one.

At five o’clock the boys and Tony and I stand at attention in the crowded international terminal. It’s always loud in here—buzzing with the emotion of so many different kinds of separation and longing. Hundreds of people hungry for reunion push to see who will be next out of the customs doors. And there’s Lily. She’s pushing a luggage cart and has a huge smile on her face. Her long blond hair hangs down. Then there’s Tyler with his steady gait. He gives a small wave. Their younger daughter, Eloise, is next, wearing her sweet, sheepish grin, and then Calla, my tall goddaughter—who takes everything in.

We hug, and I grab Lily’s hands with both of mine. We count the bags and then walk to the parking garage and climb into the van for the drive back to the city: Thorne and Aidan with the girls in the way back, Tyler and Lily and me in the middle seat. I have to keep looking at her to make sure she’s real. I’m so hopeful for her visit. Tony sits in the passenger seat and asks Lao Wu if we can go to Ritan Gongyuan, an ancient city park not far from our apartment. Our friends are so tired from the long flight, but we need to keep them awake long enough for them to eat dinner.