A Certain Smile Page 6

  "It's an issue of freedom."

  "To have a dog."

  "To have anything you want."

  "How often in life can you have anything you want?"

  "Oh—!" Frustrated, she paused, then she said, "Did you say the owners bring their birds here for fresh air?"

  "Well, not as fresh as it might be," he acknowledged, and smiled, trying to make the discussion light again. "But better than inside an apartment."

  "Is it?" she asked. "It's so hard to breathe."

  "You get used to it." He was annoyed again, and did not care if she saw it. "Some countries don't have the luxury of spending money on clean air and water. That will come later, when we are as rich as you are." He met her frown. "It isn't easy to defend all of these things, but we had to decide where to put our energy and money, and we chose new offices and factories—"

  "But some things are basic," she said. "Air. Water. Yours is so bad you have to use bottled water."

  "Someday that will change." He turned to walk on and she hurried to catch up to him. The old men and their singing birds were left behind; nothing interrupted the solid gray wall of concrete apartment buildings. Then, in the next block, they were stopped by hundreds of bicycles, locked and leaning against each other in a tilting, tangled mass, all of them old, rusting, utilitarian, without gears or hand brakes. Most had dented baskets clamped to the handlebars or to the rear fender.

  "Commuters," Li said. "They park here and take the subway to work." As they turned to walk on, out of the comer of his eye he caught a glimpse of a blue shirt and a red and blue tie. Silently, he cursed. It could be a coincidence. Or Sheng was right. If he was, it was obviously a mistake made by some stupid clerk who got Li's name mixed up with someone else's, but to cut through the bureaucracy to correct these things took time and he resented having to do it.

  Unless they're following Miranda.

  No. He did not believe that. The more he knew her the less he could believe it.

  But whatever the truth, it seemed that there would be surveillance, but no arrest, at least not yet. So he would not let it ruin the morning.

  Let them follow us; all they will learn is that two people enjoyed the market.

  "Breakfast," he said firmly, to himself as much as to Miranda, and walked a short distance to a woman and two men standing in a cloud of steam. "These are friends of mine; their food is excellent."

  Warily, Miranda surveyed the small butcher-block table, scored and darkened with use, the battered oil drum with a hole in the side revealing a raging fire, and a wok perched on top bubbling with peanut oil. The woman, small and plump, swathed in an apron that hinted at once having been white, stood at the butcher-block table, kneading an enormous ball of soft dough. Li knew exactly what Miranda was thinking: Beijing's water was not drinkable; the woman's apron was not clean; and who knew when she had last washed her hands or the table top or the utensils she and the men were using, or where their ingredients came from, or how safe any food could be, prepared in the open on a dusty street, in city air acrid with exhaust fumes and residue from burning coal.

  "Shall we eat?" Li asked. He knew he was making it a test, but if she wanted to understand Beijing, she had to accept the city for what it was. If she wants to understand me, she has to accept me for what I am.

  "Yes." Miranda exhaled a long breath, her face tight with determination. "I'd love some breakfast. I don't know how I can be hungry after last night's dinner, but I am."

  Again Li felt a rush of affection, and admiration. It was harder for her to take this step than for someone who was casual about new adventures. / wonder how many adventures she has in America. Not many, I'll bet. But, then, how many do I have in China?

  He introduced his friends to Miranda. "They play in a jazz band at night, but every day they are here. They make the best youtiao in Beijing. That means fried breadstick. And these are chive pancakes. You wrap a pancake around a breadstick and eat them together. It requires a wide mouth, but it is worth it." He grinned as Miranda managed to take a bite of the end of the long, thin breadstick and the oversize crepe-like pancake she had rolled around it.

  She looked at him in surprise. "It's wonderful."

  "One of my favorites," he said, and saw the rigid determination on her face relax as she chewed and watched the man turn another batch of breadsticks in the bubbling oil. "Would you like another?"

  "Yes. Thank you."

  They strolled on, eating, becoming part of the life of the street. Li casually sidestepped the chickens and roosters at his feet, but Miranda

  was fascinated and stared at them as they pecked at the ground around old tires, abandoned furniture and piles of garbage. But soon her attention was caught by shopkeepers unlocking their doors to reveal minuscule spaces where the entire stock could be seen from the sidewalk, goods crammed onto shelves, hanging from the ceiling, piled on the floor and, once the doors were open, helter-skelter on the sidewalk.

  While Miranda was absorbed, Li looked past her. He thought he caught a glimpse of the man in the blue shirt and red and blue tie, but he was not sure, and he dismissed him once again, and studied the neighborhood. This part of town was so far from the commercial centers that it was as if they had stepped back in time, and he felt a mg of nostalgia for a simpler, slower-paced city, without massive westernization. Of course that was foolish. No one could go backward, especially Yuan Li, engineer and contractor, whose work depended on China becoming westernized: more commercial, more efficient, bigger, faster, smarter, more capitalist. This kind of neighborhood would soon be barely a memory.

  Even now, it seemed strange to him, but then he realized that the strangeness was Miranda, quiet, slender, foreign. She was like a shaft of light in the drab streets, her silver-gray suit, the halo of her light hair, the creamy paleness of her skin. Li felt her beside him as if they were touching. Their steps matched, and he felt he was on a journey: this morning, he, too, was a foreigner in Beijing.

  "Look," said Miranda. "Chestnuts."

  Hundreds of them were lined up on a long wooden table in rows as precise as a military formation, mesh bags bulging with hundreds more on the sidewalk below. "This is where the market begins," Li said, pointing up the narrow street to their left, lined on both sides with tables and booths stretching as far as they could see.

  Miranda's face was bright with discovery. "How beautiful it is."

  Beneath the slanting rays of early-morning sunlight, the market was a tapestry of colors: deep brown chestouts, pale speckled eggs, yellow-brown strands of lily buds, light brown gingerroot, glossy purple eggplant, bright red peppers and reddish-brown star anise, loops of ivory lo mein, skinny, yard-long green beans, deep orange carrots, pale green bok choy, yellow-green cucumbers shaped like scimitars, and fat, fifteen-inch-long crinkly green Chinese cabbages, the same vegetable they had seen on apartment balconies, here stacked ten feet high against walls and fences. "A favorite food," Li said wryly as Miranda stared at them. "And it stays fresh for months."

  In wooden lean-tos, ducks and chickens hung upside down above blood-stained wooden counters where vendors used huge cleavers to

  whack them into pieces. In the middle of the street, a man in shorts and an undershirt squatted beside a wooden block, using a small knife to scrape a few last hairs from a goat's thigh. As the customer watched, he took his cleaver and hacked the leg into stew-size pieces. Scooping them up, he set them on a saucer at one end of a hand-held scale, and adjusted the weight at the other end. When the customer nodded and took coins from a purse, the butcher tilted the meat into a plastic bag, wiped his hands on a damp, blood-stained cloth, gave the wooden block a quick wipe with the same cloth, and turned to the next customer.

  Farther along, fish leaped and splashed in plastic trays. When a customer chose one, the vendor killed it by slamming its head with a two-by-four, slit it open to remove the entrails, made a pass at scaling it with a few quick swipes of a blunt knife, and weighed it on a handheld scale. Next to the fish, a
table was piled high with eels no thicker than a pencil. A woman behind the table picked up an eel, slit it precisely down the center, cleaned it out with one swift movement of her finger, and flipped it to a pile ready for purchase. It was done so quickly and economically that it seemed to be one graceful movement, and even Li, who had seen it hundreds of times, paused to watch and admire.

  Across the street a young girl was pressing bean curd and cutting it into neat squares, and in a booth beyond hers men with muslin caps covering their hair were making dumplings, their hands a blur as they brought up the edges of thinly rolled dough around a filling, then pinched the dough closed so that it resembled a small purse with a drawstring top.

  Miranda sighed. "There's too much to see. It's like a circus, only better. So much color. Except for the people."

  Li felt defensive again, even though he had had the same thought a few minutes earlier. The people wore dark blue, dark brown, black, gray, like somber splotches in the vivid oil painting of the market. "It's like the air and the water," he said as they turned to walk on. "We'll get around to brightness when we have time and money."

  "And when you feel better about yourselves? More hopeful?"

  He gave her a sharp look. "Why do you say that?"

  "Because everyone looks so grim. Oh, not everyone—you don't— but your son did, and so many people do, as if they can't imagine having anything to smile about. Maybe they can't, maybe life really is terribly hard and they just don't feel happy. But when things get easier, when they're more hopeful, they'll wear hopeful colors, bright ones."

  "Like Americans."

  "Well, yes. Why not? It's good to be hopeful."

  "But Americans are more than hopeful. They expect life to be good."

  She looked at him. "Don't you?"

  "No one in China expects life to be anything but hard. As it always has been. Except that we're beginning to be more like Americans; we're learning to hope. And I suppose, after that, we'll begin to expect things. Maybe even demand them. Like Americans. Always demanding."

  "Oh, that's ridiculous. You said that before. You keep making such absolute statements about Americans. How do you know anything about us?"

  "I read. I watch—"

  "CNN. Yes, you told me. What a peculiar way to learn about a country. Why don't you talk to Americans?"

  "Isn't that what I'm doing right now?"

  She stopped walking and stared at him, then gave a small laugh. "Well, I knew there had to be a reason for all this attention. You want to hear about America."

  "That is not the reason. Shall we have tea? We had none with our breakfast."

  Just ahead of them, two women kept kettles boiling on a grate over an oil drum fire. Li and Miranda sat on a bench and watched the women put a pinch of tea in each of two mugs and pour boiling water almost to the top. "Hold it like this," said Li. He wrapped his burning-hot mug with a large paper napkin, and Miranda did the same, and they drank the fragrant tea, watching others watching them. Suddenly a woman pointed at Miranda, talking to her friend, then another did the same, pointing at her hair, her shoes, and then at Li.

  "What's wrong with them?" she asked. "They're pointing at me.

  And staring. It's so rude Why are they doing it? What's wrong

  with me?"

  "Nothing. They're admiring you. They say your hair is like silk and your shoes are well made. They point and stare because in China that is not considered rude; it is the way people are, on the street. When life is crowded and poor, the street becomes a theater, a pageant, everyone's daily entertainment, free to all. And so they point and stare and make comments, just as you would in America, watching a show."

  "We never point or stare."

  "Well, here you may do it, and no one will think badly of you. Perhaps it will give you a new way of looking at the world."

  Their tea was cooling and they drank it easily. The sun rose higher, growing warmer. Miranda and Li let the sounds of the market lull them. Li felt content just to sit. He thought of the man who was most likely following them. He thought of his son—hostile, contempmous of Miranda, involved in illegal activities that might eventually threaten the company, and himself—and he knew he would have to deal with all of these things soon. But for now he simply absorbed the warmth of the day, and Miranda beside him.

  "It must be time to go," Miranda said, her voice soft, almost drowsy.

  "Soon."

  A group of schoolboys appeared, dressed identically in shiny blue running suits with small red scarves, and backpacks bulging with books. They bought sections of grapefruit-like pomelos from a man who squatted at a low table peeling off the bitter skin and separating the large triangular segments of fruit. Juice ran down the boys' fingers and they flicked drops at each other, laughing, dodging back and forth.

  Miranda sat straighten "How lovely they are. So full of life. Like Adam and Lisa."

  Li felt an odd stab of jealousy, seeing her withdraw to thoughts of her daughter and son and a life on the other side of the world, with nothing at all to do with him.

  "Isn't it strange," she said. "I've been so busy, but then something reminds me of them and I remember how incredibly far away they are and I feel ... oh, helpless, I guess; not part of their lives, with no way to be close to them. At home, you know, I hardly think about them during the day; I'm working, they're at school, we're where we belong. And I guess I miss that as much as I miss them: all of us where we belong, in our proper places. There's something so comfortable about that." She was still looking at the schoolboys. "Those red scarves ... don't they mean they're Young Pioneers? Sort of a children's Communist Party?"

  "If they want to join when they're older," Li said indifferently. "They don't have to. Many of them do, because it helps in business. It's an easy way to achieve guanxi. Connections."

  Miranda smiled. "In America it would be called clout."

  "The same thing."

  The boys ran off, still in a group. Miranda watched until they were gone.

  "Why did you come to China?" Li asked.

  She looked at him in surprise. "I told you. I'm working with—"

  "I understand that. I meant, why did you accept this assignment? You said you don't travel much, you don't like to leave home, you

  miss your children and the comfort of everything in its proper place."

  "Yes, but—" She hesitated and Li could almost hear her debating with herself about how much to say. Was she afraid of getting too personal, or was she making sure her story was believable? Why can't I stop being suspicious of her? he thought angrily. Everything is so good, we are becoming friends. But I want to know her. Not from suspicion. Just because I want to understand who she is.

  "You said you were bom in Boulder Colorado," he said, "in the house where your parents still live. And you have always lived there?"

  "Yes."

  "And you like it very much."

  "Of course."

  "Even when you went to college?"

  She gave him a quick look of surprise. "It seemed strange when I went to college."

  "Where did you go?"

  "The University of Colorado."

  "In Boulder Colorado?"

  She smiled. "Yes. But I met people from all over the world, and I realized that I was the only one who hadn't been anywhere, except Denver, and that was less than an hour from my front door."

  "Is that what seemed strange?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'd always thought I was the same as other people, but then I heard conversations about places I'd never even heard of.... No, it wasn't the places so much as the way they talked about going to them, so smooth and easy.... They knew so much, it was all part of their lives, and I didn't know anything."

  "And it made you unhappy?"

  "I suppose it did. But mostly just.. . envious, I guess. But then they'd talk about tetanus shots, and gamma globulin injections, and malaria pills, and buying insect repellant and Imodium and those little
rolls of toilet paper for places that don't have any—maybe not even toilets—and fending off beggars and not drinking the water, and everything sounded uncomfortable and dangerous and I'd think that even if they did know more than I did, I couldn't imagine going through all that. Besides not knowing languages or how I'd get around. . . . And then I married Jeff and we never had much money."

  "So you've still never been farther than Denver."

  "Of course I have. I go to New York two or three times a year to meet with Talia and other designers, and some of our customers."

  "So you know New York."

  "A little. I go there to work; I don't have time to be a tourist."

  "But you could make the time?"

  "I suppose so. I'm always anxious to get home."

  "Because your children need you?"

  "Because that's where I like to be," she snapped. After a moment, she added, "It would be different if I were with someone. I do go to museums and art galleries sometimes, but I hate eating alone in a restaurant, so I eat in my hotel room, and once I went alone to the opera, and I hated that, too. Everyone was part of a couple and at intermission they were all drinking champagne, talking, laughing, and I wandered around thinking they were all wondering what was wrong with me that I didn't have anyone—"

  Li's eyebrows rose in shock, and she said quickly, "I know they weren't really wondering that—I know that no one was paying any attention to me at all—but that's how I felt, I felt different, and I can't stand that, so I just went back to my seat and stayed there."

  "The same as eating dinner in your hotel room," Li said.

  "What's so terrible about that?" she shot back.

  "Only that you miss many things. And it can be fine to be alone with one's own thoughts and feelings; often one's own company is the best."

  "What do you know about it? You live in a country where there are always crowds."

  "You just told me you can be very much alone in a crowd. And I am, often, very much alone."

  "Why?"

  "Well, we can talk about me later. Right now, we are talking about you, and I am wondering why you are in China."