A Free Life Page 50

  Danning’s daughter, Weiwei, stepped in, called Nan “Uncle Wu,” and then told her father that she had dragged Nan’s suitcase into the guest room, which was in the east wing house and adjacent to Danning’s study and their family room. The girl wore glasses and looked studious and undernourished. Though already fifteen, she was so thin that she seemed well under the age of puberty. Her father told her to prepare a basin of warm water so that Uncle Wu could freshen up.

  As the two friends were talking, Nan felt an itch in his throat. Unconsciously he massaged the area below his Adam’s apple with his thumb and forefinger. He didn’t give more thought to this discomfort and just kept drinking the jasmine tea Danning poured him. When Weiwei got the water ready, Nan went out to wash. On a stone bench under a crab apple tree sat a brass basin, beside which were a folded towel and a plastic case containing a bar of green soap. Nan soaked the towel in the water and rubbed his face and neck with it.

  Quickly he went back into the house, eager to resume conversing with his friend. Although he felt refreshed after the washing, his throat still itched. His breathing went rough, but he tried to ignore it.

  Over tea the two of them caught up with each other. Danning now worked at the Beijing Writers’ Association and had been writing a script for a TV series. He disliked the show because the story was set in the Ming dynasty, six hundred years ago, but it paid well, much more than fiction. “Why write an ancient story?” Nan asked.

  “It’s safe to do that. Many, many writers are working on ancient stuff nowadays.”

  “Isn’t it hard to make such work literary?” Nan said in earnest.

  Danning slapped the top of his thigh and laughed. “If you lived here, Nan, you’d have to forget about literature. The higher-ups want us to write about dead people and ancient events because this is a way to make us less subversive and more inconsequential. It’s their means of containing China’s creative energy and talents. The saddest part is that in this way we can produce only transient work.”

  “I see, it’s a trap.”

  Danning sighed and said he had been misusing his time for too long and must return to the real work soon. Nan didn’t ask him what kind of writing he had in mind as “the real work” and instead expressed his admiration for the number of books (half a dozen) his friend had written. “None of them is any good,” Danning insisted. “I’ve just been frittering away my life. Unlike in America, here I have no real struggle for livelihood. You see, I live comfortably. I just take up a project, finish it, and get paid.” He looked languid, as if already an old man in spite of his relatively young looks. Nan noticed that his hairline had retreated quite a bit, giving him a larger forehead than before. Also, Danning had a double chin, but that was almost covered by his chin-strap beard. Despite his easy life, despite his spacious home, despite his success, Danning was definitely unhappy.

  Nan drank more tea to soothe his throat; still he couldn’t breathe easily, his windpipe tight. Danning called his wife at work to see if she’d like to join them for lunch at a café. She was delighted and said she would. Before they set out, Nan finally told his friend, “My throat feels dry and funny. Something is wrong.”

  “So you have trouble breathing, don’t you?” Danning smiled quizzically.

  “Yes, like having asthma.”

  “You know what? You must have an allergy.”

  “Really? An allergy to what?”

  “To the air, the smog. When my wife came back from America she had the same problem. It took her a month to get used to the air here, to become a Chinese again.” He tossed his head back and laughed. “Let me see if we still have some Benadryl.” He went into a bedroom and came out with a brown bottle. “Here, take this.” He shook out two caplets into Nan’s cupped palm.

  Knowing the pills might make him drowsy, Nan swallowed them anyway. Then together they headed out. Weiwei, watching a movie on TV, didn’t come with them. She asked her father to bring back a meat pie for her.

  7

  FOREVER LOVE CAFÉ was a very small place. Its side windows looked onto a man-made lake, which, ringed with white sand, was more like a pond, without any trace of fish or waterfowl in it. Two teenage boys were swimming near the opposite shore, their red and white caps bobbing on the green water. Danning knew the owner of the restaurant, a handsome, lean-faced man, and introduced Nan to him as his friend from overseas. “Welcome back,” the man said warmly, waving the cigarette held between his fingers.

  They sat at a table beside a window. The room had a faintly vinegary smell, emanating from the cold dishes contained in the enamel basins in the glass display case. A waitress with squarish shoulders came and put a porcelain teapot and two cups between them. “Their specialities are braised pork tripe and beef tendons,” Danning told Nan. “They also serve panfried noodles and rice for lunch. But their offerings may be far below the standard of your restaurant, so please bear with them.”

  “Come on, you think I’m rich and finicky about food?”

  “You’re a businessman now.”

  “I’m still struggling to survive there.”

  “Yet you’re rich.”

  “Only by Chinese standards.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Sirong, Danning’s wife, appeared, a petite woman smiling with a broad mouth and bulging eyes. She reminded Nan of a giant gold-fish, though she looked good-natured and carefree. She held out her hand to him and said, “It’s so nice to meet you finally. Danning often mentioned you. When did you arrive?”

  “Three hours ago.” He shook her hand, which was small and soft.

  “Well, what do you think of Beijing now?”

  “There are more cars, more buildings, and more people.”

  The couple cracked up. “That’s a very accurate observation,” Danning said, turning to his wife. “I told you he’s a sharp fellow. He’s having the same kind of allergic reaction as you did.”

  “You are?” she asked Nan. “No wonder you look so pale. But don’t worry. You’ll be all right soon. It’s just the process of getting readjusted. You’ll feel normal within a month.”

  Nan thought of telling her that he’d be going back to the States the next week, but he refrained. He didn’t feel like talking much and just enjoyed listening to them. The waitress came again and put a teacup before Sirong. Sirong ordered a wonton soup.

  When the panfried noodles, the wontons, and the shredded beef tendons arrived, Sirong said to Nan, “I must confess I miss America, a lot.”

  “What do you miss most?”

  “Things like big apples, big salmon, and big lobster,” she said in all sincerity. “Also, I’m a chocoholic and miss all kinds of chocolates they have there.”

  Nan laughed and told her, “We serve salmon in our restaurant every day. You should come and visit us.”

  “I’d love to. Mmmm, I still remember the lobster and shrimp we had at a crab shack in Plymouth, near the Mayflower. You see, here fish are skimpy and fruit puny. We Chinese eat too much and have used up our land.”

  Danning added, turning to Nan, “Overeating is a big problem among children now.”

  Nan nodded. “I saw some big fat kids this morning, like in the States.”

  “Not just children who overeat, grown-ups too,” said Sirong. “Danning goes to dinner parties at least four times a week. Look how fat he is now. Besides, he has high cholesterol and hypertension.”

  Indeed, Danning had gained at least thirty pounds. Nan said to him, “You’ve got to be careful about your health. You’re no longer a young man.”

  “In fact,” said Danning, “I’m doing better than most of my colleagues. Many of them have to battle diabetes and high blood fat levels, having eaten too much meat and sugar. My boss’s triglycerides are over seven hundred. He often says he might have a stroke or drop dead anytime. Speaking of dinner parties, I’m supposed to attend one with a group of writers tonight. Nan, would you like to come with me? It’ll be fun. You’ll meet some important people.”<
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  “All right, I’ll come.”

  Sirong had to return to work before one-thirty and left the moment she was done with her wontons. The two friends strolled back, Danning holding a thick pie stuffed with pork and chives for his daughter. At a clothing stand Nan bought a tartan skirt as a present for the girl despite her father’s protesting, “She already has too much stuff.”

  While they walked, they chatted about people they both knew. Danning mentioned that Mr. Manping Liu had died a month before and that only one small newspaper had printed a brief obituary, because the old scholar had refused to retract his statement about the necessity of democratizing the Communist regime and write the self-criticism the Party committee of his research institute had admonished him to do. Danning had gone to his funeral service, attended by only thirty people. The two friends also talked about Bao Yuan, whose paintings had been exhibited in a gallery in Beijing last fall, together with two other artists’ works; Danning wasn’t sure how well his work had been received here, but some of his colleagues had liked the show. A high-circulation weekly, Art News, even published a long article on Bao, written by an American art critic named Tim Dullington. Without commenting on that, Nan realized that as before, his own name as the translator must have been suppressed.

  Exhausted and groggy, Nan slept for the rest of the afternoon in the guest room. He snored loudly, which fascinated the girl in the next room, who had never met anyone who made such thunderous noise in his sleep. On her dad’s instructions, she lowered the volume of the TV, yet when Nan’s snores penetrated the wall, interfering with the voice of the math teacher on the screen, she turned it up again. But whenever she did this, her father would come out of his study and order her to keep it down. Besides not wanting to wake Nan, he couldn’t think clearly with the TV blasting.

  8

  TOWARD EVENING, a midnight blue Audi with tinted windows came to pick Danning up. He and Nan got into the air-conditioned car, which rolled away noiselessly and headed for Haidian District. The chauffeur, wearing aviator glasses and a peaked cap, seemed savvy and apparently knew Danning well, but he was reticent while the two passengers in back were talking about Beijing’s real estate market, which had kept booming in recent years. The average home price had increased by twenty percent annually, and some people had unexpectedly become millionaires, having bought a couple of apartments for a song a few years before. Danning urged Nan to buy a pied-à-terre here, for which there’d be no realty tax, but Nan chuckled, saying he didn’t have $30,000 to spare.

  The chauffeur tooted the horn, urging a cyclist to make way for their car, which bucked again and again as if about to crush the bicycle, but its rider simply didn’t respond. Not until the man rounded a corner could their car resume a normal speed. Dangling from the rearview mirror was a tiny oval portrait of Chairman Mao with a golden tassel. Nan wondered if that was some sort of amulet.

  As they were approaching a crossroads, the light turned red, but their car didn’t stop. The chauffeur signaled and drove left, ignoring the honking of other vehicles. A green motorcycle puttered up behind them, and a policeman in the side car shouted through a bullhorn, “Pull over to the side!”

  “Fucking cops!” cursed the driver without moving his head. He clicked on the blinker, slowing down, and brought the car to a stop.

  “Are they going to give you a ticket?” Nan asked him.

  “Oh well, I’ve never paid a fine.”

  Nan turned around and saw the two policemen hop off the motorcycle and stride up to their car. But as they were approaching, one of them pointed at the rear of the Audi, then they both veered off to a newsstand as if to deal with a more urgent incident over there first. Nan was bewildered.

  The chauffeur said in an undertone, “Bastards, they’re not that stupid.” He pulled away smoothly.

  “Why did they change their minds?” Nan asked.

  “This is an army vehicle,” explained Danning. “They just saw the plate on the back.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the rear window.

  “So army vehicles don’t have to follow the traffic rules?” asked Nan.

  The chauffeur said, “They can give me as many tickets as they like, but there’s no way they can collect the fines.”

  Danning winked at Nan, then spoke in English so that the driver couldn’t understand. “You see, power comes out of the barrel of a gun.”

  Nan said, “Zis is crazy, still like two decades ago.”

  “Yes, things are basically the same.”

  They pulled into the yard of a medium-size hotel, and the chauffeur told them that he would come around nine-thirty to pick them up. Through a moon gate Danning and Nan entered the yard behind the building, where a two-story manor was half shaded by tall, dusty cypresses. In front of that house was a tiny pond, with a few mossy rocks erected in its middle and inhabited by orange carp and gold-fish, whose tails and fins spread in the water like floating tulle. Danning and Nan went into the house and then turned in to the restaurant on the first floor, in which sat only a few people. The dimly lighted room felt damp, four long-fluked ceiling fans revolving with a rasping sound.

  “Welcome!” a roly-poly man cried at them. Obviously the host, he was wearing a herringbone suit and shiny oxfords. He showed them to a table in a corner where five men were already seated. At the sight of Danning, they all got up and stretched out their hands, which Danning shook one by one.

  With pride he introduced Nan to them as his American friend. They were all pleased to see Nan. On the table were two saucers containing condensed milk and a bamboo basket holding tiny steamed buns, both serving as an appetizer. They went on gossiping about some recent events in Beijing’s literary circles: the nominations for this year’s major prizes and what offices were involved; which one of the pretty young women writers had outsold the others; the two poets who had just been offered a trip to Paris the next spring; an editor who had been fired last week for publishing a book offensive to the authorities, which had changed the policy, punishing editors in place of authors; how there was going to be a conference on a first novel by a young man whose father was a high-ranking official in the State Council. Nan knew nothing about their world and just listened.

  Mengfei, the loudest among them, was a lieutenant colonel in the air force and a well-known fiction writer. It was this fleshy-faced man with a bull’s neck and shoulders who had sent the Audi to fetch Danning. Sometimes he taught literary theory and modern fiction at the Arts Institute of the People’s Liberation Army. He had just published a novella in Flower City, a top-notch magazine, so he had gathered his writer friends here to celebrate. Among them there was another officer, a captain who was a poet, and the rest were all civilians. Nan vaguely remembered seeing in a newspaper the photograph of the bald man sitting across from him. The man had introduced himself as Fanlong, an editor in the Writers’ Publishing House. Seated next to the colonel was a spare man who was a journalist specializing in reportage literature, but he didn’t speak much because he’d stutter whenever he opened his mouth. Unlike them, Nan didn’t touch the Luzhou whiskey, which was too strong for him; instead, he sipped Five Star beer from a tall glass.

  A waitress came and handed them the menu. Nan was puzzled by the names of the dishes. There were so many unfamiliar items that he wasn’t sure what to order. He asked Danning, “What is this—‘Parents and Children’?”

  His friend grinned. “It’s just pickled soybeans and soy sprouts.”

  “Then I won’t eat the whole family.” Nan chuckled but didn’t ask about the other fancy names. The rest of the men didn’t bother to open the menu and instead let Fanlong order for them. The man, well known for his ability to plan parties and dinners, mentioned a dozen dishes to the waitress and also asked for more liquor and beer for everyone.

  “Nan, what are the hot novels published in the United States recently?” asked Mengfei, who seemed quite knowledgeable about contemporary American fiction. As a matter of fact, he had been to the Sta
tes as a visiting scholar at Stanford, and in their conversation he often trotted out the phrase “when I was in America,” which Danning told him not to use just for this occasion, at which there was no need for him to impress others.

  “A novel called Cold Mountain is very popular at the moment,” Nan told Mengfei.

  “Who wrote it?”

  “A new writer named Charles Frazier, but I haven’t read the book yet.” Nan paused, then added, “I brought back a copy of American Pastoral for Danning.”

  The spare man with slanting eyebrows seated next to Mengfei spoke in a shrill voice. “Th-that’s Philip Roth’s ne-new novel!”

  “Yes,” Nan said.

  Fanlong butted in, “I like Roth a lot, especially his Ghost Writer.”

  “I think Saul Bellow is better,” mumbled the bespectacled man sitting next to Danning.

  “Ah, Bellow is smart and funny,” Mengfei said, and smacked his lips as if tasting his own words.

  In addition to parading their knowledge of American literature, they also talked about Calvino, Kundera, and Duras, none of whom was familiar to Nan, though at present they were popular here. So when Mengfei asked his opinion, Nan said, “I don’t read fiction very often. I read more poetry.”

  “Wonderful,” the bright-eyed captain put in.

  Fanlong added, “We just bought Derek Walcott’s new book.”

  Nan was startled and realized that these men might be bureaucrats in the Chinese literary world. Now he should be more careful about what he was going to say. Probably they did indeed know a lot about American authors through translations.

  The dishes came, loaded on a serving cart. Two young waitresses in pea green aprons began placing the courses on the table. “This is ‘Trotting on a Country Path,’” declared one of them. Nan batted his eyes to look at the dish closely. Heavens, it was just braised pig trotters garnished with a few sprigs of parsley! Despite his bewilderment, he said nothing. Then together the waitresses lifted a large platter containing a fried flounder. There were also several cold cuts and sautéed vegetables. Finally the taller woman put the last plate on the table with both hands and said, “Here’s your ‘Whispers.’” Nan tried hard to stifle his laughter on looking at the dish, which was nothing but smoked beef tongues lying in aspic.