I am assigned a tutor for engineering, to help me make up the time I have lost. I am embarrassed. It is clearly my incompetence, they feel I am not quick enough to make it up on my own. It is low self-esteem, I am aware. I am alone, Chen has his circle of friends, it seems to me that in the four weeks I have lost, everyone else has adjusted.
I am unable to fathom engineering, so I go to my tutor, taking the lift to the bottom of the Dong-ta, the East Tower, where I live, crossing the arcade of shops that connects the overcity complex above the University to the Bei-ta, the North Tower, and taking the lift back up to the address I have been given. I knock on the door, and Yang Haibao opens it.
His eyes flicker down and up, very swiftly, and he smiles. He is smooth faced with a stiff brush of hair. "Hello," he says in Poutonghua, "you are the man with the incredible name?"
"Zhang," I answer. Lenin and Mao Zedong, my huaqiao name! "I suffer for the sins of my parents," I add, a glib response, a play on Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought which says the child is formed by the parents and the son of the landlord is also a landlord, even if he owns no land. Only after I have said it do I think, I am in China and I don't know this man and I watch to see if he is offended.
Not at all. He grins, "Come in," he says.
His dormitory. How can I say what it is like to walk into Haibao's dormitory? His name means 'Sea-wave' although a better translation is tidal wave. The room is blue and lightfish swim lazily near the ceiling, skeletons aglow. His room faces out, looking at the city-Chen's and my room faces into the inner wall-and the city is going to smoky twilight, so it seems as if the blue goes on and on. Furniture is soft, dusky shapes.
He waves his hand and the room programming picks up. Lightfish flicker into shadows and are gone and the light comes up, the window dims, and suddenly the room is bright. The furniture revealed shifts chameleon-like to rose and the pale yellow walls seem to be textured, like cotton.
"Nice room," I say.
"Thanks," he says. "Can I get you a beer? Nanjing beer."
Nanjing beer is supposed to be very good. "Thank you, but I can't. New kidneys."
"That's right, you've been sick," he says.
I tell it briefly, tired already of explaining and not wanting to bore him. He makes me nervous. He is polished, his clothes casual and, to my eye, expensive. I think to myself I will remember that open shirt, the brushed gray tights, the calf high boots. Look for something like that. I wonder what he thinks of me in my American clothes, looking huaqiao and appearing with the outlandish name of Zhang Zhong Shan.
"How tiresome for you," he says, with sympathy. "How do you like China?"
I am ready to march out the platitudes but I don't. "I don't know, I've spent most of the time here in bed."
He laughs. My foolish heart, I am in love with him. This polished young man with his perfect clothes. He cannot be bent, I cannot be so lucky, and yet, and yet.
Does he dance? That's the way to tell. When a straight man meets a straight woman, they dance. When I meet someone bent, we dance. It is so subtle. I only know when I meet a straight man, he doesn't dance. It seems to me that Haibao and I are dancing, watching each other's faces a little longer, responding by looking away or swift nervous smiles. But this is China, maybe I'm crossing cultural signals. I'm lonely and I want this young man, this polished tidal wave, to be like me. To like me.
We start at the beginning and he grounds me in engineering. He's a pretty good teacher, he understands my need to know what something means. I arrange to come back on Thursday.
That evening I stop in the arcade and buy a copy of a magazine called Xiansheng, a men's magazine I've picked up once in awhile in New York. It's as expensive here as it is in New York. Beautiful men in shirts that shimmer like lacquer and silk jackets brocaded with cranes and dragons. The sweaters have hoods. Everyone is wearing those calf high boots that Haibao had on.
Thursday I have class from eight to ten (a math class) and then I am free until three. I go shopping.
I head north up Daqing Lu, the street is lined with stores. I stop and look in windows, the prices are ghastly. I have some of my Baffin Island salary on credit plus a stipend from the University. Because I study technology, my only cost was getting here, the rest is scholarship. Getting here was expensive enough. Clothes are five times what they would cost at home. And strange. The refinements of fashion look awkward to my untutored eyes. First I buy a pair of those skintight calf-high boots. I feel confident about those.
Then a pair of rust-colored coveralls. I've seen people in these and I have good shoulders. I think the coveralls will flatter me. I finger a brocade jacket, all yellow with circles of long life worked in it and stylized blue waves across the bottom. So expensive, three weeks of my inflated Baffin Island salary for a jacket. And I don't know what it means. What kind of person would wear this jacket, what does it say about the wearer?
If I don't know then it would undoubtedly call out, 'Huaqiao with more money than sense.'
So I buy conservatively, spending money to blend in, not to impress. How painful. But when I think of my sweaters with the leather ties and the mirrors and look out at Daqing Lu, filled with shoppers and scooters and segmented buses, I can only wince. If Haibao ever saw the way I dressed at home… At least I will not embarrass myself.
That night I study engineering and think of questions to ask Haibao. I want to catch on quickly, be brilliant. After an hour and a half of study I'm drawn back to Xiansheng. I study the clothes, but more closely I study the ads. The regular features show some sort of fashionable ideal, but the ads, they show something that has to pass for everyday life. A different ideal.
I wish I had someone to talk to, someone to compare notes with. Not Xiao Chen, who dresses like a tech; coveralls that he could have worn twenty years ago, and will probably be wearing twenty years from now, all in grays and navy blues. Peter. But Peter is in Brooklyn and I am in China.
I write him a letter that begins, "I'm in love again." It's ten here in Nanjing, so it's morning in Brooklyn and he's at work. Well, the letter will be waiting for him when he gets home. "Love from the Middle Kingdom, Zhang." And then I hit transmit.
Does he take in my new clothes when his eyes flicker over me? It is hard to tell. Maybe the rust coveralls are wrong? "Hello," he says. His room is all the color of a sunset until he rather absently waves his hand and then the only sunset is outside his window. And himself, dressed in a thigh-length tunic that shifts from red at the neck to indigo at the hem. The same brushed gray tights and calf-high boots.
He is distant and pre-occupied this evening. I don't know how to act, so I open my book and feign diligence.
"You teach well," I say after awhile.
"Thank you," he says. "I was a teacher."
"Of engineering?" I say, surprised. I though he was a student.
"No, I taught physics in middle school."
I had thought him younger than me. "What made you quit?" I ask, wondering, are those wrinkles at the corners of his eyes? Is he older than I am? He is an engineering marvel, full of suggested cables and supports, tense under his easiness.
He shrugs. "No money in teaching. No guanxi, either. Fifteen-year-olds aren't very good people to make connections with."
"How did you get reassigned?" I ask without thinking.
"A friend," he says vaguely. "How did you get to school?"
"I was a construction tech on an island in the Arctic circle for a year. I got special placement." I shouldn't have asked him how he got to school. Teaching is an assigned job, a work unit job, cradle to grave security but the drawback is that it's hard to change. Like the army. Not like my job, which is a free market job, but has no health care, no security, almost no protection. I get a housing allowance, but except for the Baffin Island job I've never had assigned housing until Nanjing. But I can quit any time I want to, go to employment and get on the job assignment list.