His name was... actually, I don't remember. I'm terrible with Chinese names. (And by that I don't mean Samson, Grace, Edmund, Wilson, etc.)
It was the first grade. He lived on the first floor in the building across the courtyard. Back then, housing in Beijing was distributed by the government so that all the artists lived in one area, all the scientists another. As a result, opera singers and violinists coloured our waking hours, and when children finally worked up the coordination and courage to sneak onto rooftops, they were surprised to see ballerinas in leotards pointing their toes and flexing their limbs, like birds preparing for take-off. On the streets and in courtyards, moody poets murmured to themselves, holding their hands behind their backs.
In contrast, First Boyfriend came from a mercenary family who had their own driver and a black car with curtains. I did not know why they were stationed with us, but I did know and help spread the impressive fact that he had his own bedroom, a commodity so rare that it wasn't even coveted. It was simply stunning and foreign. You might as well have told us that his father is a snowman. Later, when we were a couple, I went over to his house and saw that the legendary bedroom was actually a section of his parents' bedroom separated with a hanging curtain.
We were in the same class, with fifty other students. He wasn't particularly smart, but he was good looking and because of his mercenary family and private bedroom, we always associated him with a shiny aura of wealth. We were young and raised communist, so inoccent that we didn't even know to be ashamed of our attraction to the material world.
I did not hold any cards. I was not popular and my test results only ranked third in the class. I didn't even have a long thick braid of hair that reached impressively down my back. But I knew what I wanted, and it was First Boyfriend.
I don't know how he felt about me, and I didn't really care. I simply decided to enter into a relationship with him in which I owned him. In every other area of my childhood, I was taken advantage of, robbed of snacks, always in awe of someone bigger, louder, and oblivious to my admiration, suffering, and existence in general. But with First Boyfriend, I was way ahead of my years.
"I hate you," I whispered into his ear, grinning dangerously about our class room. I had been watching First Boyfriend have a conversation with another girl, one of those nice ones who didn't kill earthworms nor have the balls to save bees encased in a cage of soft mud (after putting them there in the first place and then feeling bad about it). I watched them enviously from a distance. Envious of their ability to have a conversation as much as anything else. So I swung myself towards them, between the two long rows of children's desks. It was my first taste of jealousy and I enjoyed how unhealthy it felt, how powerfully unhealthy.
He looked at me, surprised and confused but not quite hurt. Delighted with the drama that I seemed to be escalating, I walked back down to the end of the row of desks and repeated the whole thing all over again, swinging eagerly towards the still-conversing couple.
When I got close enough, just a little bit happier than the last time, I whispered the lovely words once again into First Boyfriend's ear. But this time, he barely flinched and I slid away, daunted, perplexed, broody.
I was not familiar with the concept of "dating." Back then, people were either children or parents. We switched hats in the blink of an eye, as quick as we can. There was no such thing as teenage culture, no discourse on finding oneself, no romantic struggle through the identity matrix. The Cultural Revolution tried to abolish religion and idolatry. But it was as puritan as any other religious movement, and we grew up wary of people with unformed identities, shifting ideas, and unresolved goals. We did not want to consider the villany of romance, the messiness of process.
"You are a little adult, a miniature grown-up," my mom would tease me in front of her friends. I turned my back to her and smiled secretly at her joke, which I always took as a compliment.
"Let's go somewhere after school," I announced.
"Where do you want to go?" First Boyfriend asked.
We decided to go to the one place that we could go to without having to cross any major streets from our apartment courtyard, a convenience store We marched somberly and proudly through the aisles of canned pickels, haw berry candy flakes. Anyone who saw us thought that we were just two kids, wandering around, possibly stealing haw candy flakes. But the truth was that we were actually mini adults, our bond was strong and founded on jealousy.
By our second week together, I was ready for more.
"Meet me in the stairewell in your building. Top floor. After lunch," I commanded.
First Boyfriend opened his mouth, slowly extending his feelings into some sort of protest.
"Skip your nap," I schemed.
We initiated our plan the very next day. Although our buildings shared a courtyard, we were careful to never walk home together.
"Leave me be, on this side of the street," I admonished him. Then, behind my other shoulder, I spoke to a green thicket that snaked along my path home: "I can see you, Nai Nai! Walk farther away!"
Nai Nai was my nanny, an old peasant woman who I knew to be exactly fifty-six years old because I asked this information from her, and other prying questions, on a daily basis.
"Tell me again how your baby girl died, Nai Nai," I'd ask childishly, with neither cruelty nor empathy.
"She starved to death," Nai Nai would answer in her default adverb: softly. Everything about her was soft and gentle. Her black hair had been softened to grey, and her worn out clothes were soft and the colourless at the knees and elbows, as if someone had tried to rub her out with an eraser.
My mother had instructed her to walk me to and from school. A simple task, my mother must've thought. Little did she know the complexities and subtleties that lay ahead of Nai Nai four times a day -I came home once at lunch as well. Simply put, I felt that I did not need a chaperone, was embarrassed about it, angrily so, and as a result I bossed around the old woman who had gifted me with the love leftover from her short-lived baby the moment she saw me, so young I had not yet even seen myself. She was poor and could not spoil me properly with money. The one time I connived her into buying me a small toy giraffe resulted in an extremely protracted, barely understood lecture from my dad, told with the large, incredulous eyes of new parents discovering that children, though innocent, can still harm. Thus, bereft of material wealth, Nai Nai spoiled me with patience, loads and loads of patience. Behind the thicket, she slowed down and let the space between us lengthen.
Once home, I ate abnormally quickly and paced across the living room until my mother fell asleep in our bedroom. Once she passed the perfuntory tests that one performs on a suspected sleeper, I slipped out of the apartment and across the courtyard, brimming with the sound of ciccadas that had spilled over from summer into the early fall, through a tangle of shawdows cast by the giant canopy of birch and oak trees overhead, and into the stairwell of First Boyfriend's apartment.
"Cui Can!" I yelled. Cui Can was the name of a boy, a year older, who lived in an apartment one stairwell over. Cui Can was not my boyfriend. He was our code word.
Immediately, I heard a door open and close slowly and saw First Boyfriend walking timidly out to meet me in the stairwell. He just about opened his mouth when I shook my head no, and pointed upstairs tactically. Secrecy was key.
We climed the dusty concrete steps quietly, child sweat forming along our foreheads. We were excited but did not know what we were excited about. What would be at the top of the stairs? Who would we become once we got there? We had not grown up watching romantic comedies or shows of tweens kissing on the playground, we had not been underfoot a millieu of adults joking about dating, relationships and sex. Those things were verboten in our Communist upbringing; we coloured our suns red in every drawing and were taught to distrust entrepreunuers and readers of too much fiction. We were not children copying adults. We were children following an instinct up the stairs.
We got to the very top, where the stairs sort of turned into a little landing that had become a communal attic of sorts, a warehouse of slightly broken wicker and deflated momentos. We paused. First Boyfriend looked at me for further direction.
I licked my lips and tried to think of something.
Then I kissed him like I'd been kissed my whole life, on the cheeks, the way one greets a baby.
After we traded cheek kises, I kissed him on the mouth.
It tastes like nothing, I thought, surprised as if I had expected boys to come in strong flavours, like haw berry candy.
Next, we found ourselves in a hug. As I found my mouth once again close to his ear, the sheer convenience of the moment motivated me to try for another dramatic moment.
"How many children do you want to have?" I whispered.
"Wha?", he pulled back, startled.
"I want to have four," I replied soothingly, in full defiance of the Single Child Policy, but not on purpose. Because at that moment, there were no government policies, there were no rules on people at all. For a few minutes every day after lunch, we escaped the intricate rules of everyday life like little astronauts, going as high as children possibly could, away from the pull of gravity and government.
As the school year progressed, I kept upping the ante, forcing the excitement to stay constant when we grew accustomed to the current level of intimacy. One Saturday, I transferred the responsibility of calling our code word to him.
His performance was perfect. I, however, encountered an unforseen complication.
"I have to go out," I mumbled to my mother as I struggled to put on my jelly sandals.
"Why? Someone's calling for Cui Can, not you," my mom pointed out.
"I want to go out and play!"
"But we're going to grandma and grandpa's this afternoon, and we need to go NOW. Remember the chicken we bought for them yesterday? Their cook is going to make a big feast for us!" my mom sang easily as she walked from one room to another, gathering our things for our weekly visit.
"But I want to go out and play!"
She yelled at me a little bit then, impatient and angry, panicked the way parents get when their first child first disobeys. My dad wasn't around to be the bad cop anymore, having left us when I was four to forage a better, freer life for us abroad. But secretly, for he was dispatched only to learn from the foreigners and bring the fruit of his lessons back to the motherland, a country that we loved, hosted by people that we feared.
Then she left, stomped out of the apartment, chicken in hand, slammed the door with the other. By this time, the end of our terrible row, I had worked myself into a crouched position under her desk, and spent the ensuing time alone being oppressed by the loud tick-tocking of the large clock on the wall. A few minutes later, she came back, non consolatory, pretending to have forgotten something. I climbed out from under the desk and helped her find the pretend thing, and we moped in separate spheres on the bus ride all the way to her parents' apartment across town.
I don't remember how First Boyfriend and I ended our relationship. Did an adult find out, walking up to retrieve an old razor set from the upstairs communal attic, only to catch two six year olds in an embrace, our pants down to our knees, whispering about how many children we should have? I don't remember anything, except that when my mom and I left Beijing, at the end of the first grade, in August of 1986, I did not say good-bye to First Boyfriend. Nor did I think about him, as I sat simply beside Nai Nai in front of a lunch that she had made special for me, with my favourite foods (cucumber and scrambled eggs, a whole fish), even though she knew full well that I'd just had a farewell lunch with my mom and her friends.
As always, she didn't wear her virtue on her sleeve, but said something absent mindedly about extra food, that she was eating lunch by herself, did I want to join her? No, I didn't, I wanted to run around and climb the pole hanging from the giant oak tree one more time. But Bei Bei, please, come with me, just a minute, come with Nai Nai. Okay, okay, but this is very annoying.
She had secured a room on the first floor, the apartment of an old man in his seventies who she'd started to help take care of part-time when I started first grade. We were in his bedroom, sitting on his bed which doubled as a bench, the second lunch laid out on the table beside it.
"Eat," she said softly.
"Hey are you going to marry the old man who lives here?" I asked gleefully as I ransacked my brain for other fun and intrusive questions.
Then she began to cry and I was scared. Congruent with everything else about her, she cried softy into her sleeve and her body shook gently up and down, up and down.
I looked around uncomfortably. Swung my legs so that they hit something under the bed and made blunt, sad sounds. Everything was sad, it was inescapable.
She only kept me inside her sadness for a few minutes before her generosity and stoicism took over and set me free to climb trees and ravage ant hills, but not before gifting me with some small materialistic treasure that I had been pining for for months: a pair of coloured hair elastics to replace the un-pretty industrial strength rubber ones that my mom had absent-mindedly picked out for me. Those coloured elastics, the earliest evidence of the resurgence of frill post-cultural revolution, must have cost Nai Nai dearly. But I did not realize the significance of her gift, or of much else that afternoon I stepped onto a train for Shanghai in a white ballerina dress that only a young mother would imagine to be appropriate for the first leg of a trip to the other side of the world, where her daughter would pick up many more coloured elastics, a new language, a new timidity, and her Subsequent Boyfriends.
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Epilogue
Seven years later, the two of us flew back to Beijing with two male companions in tow: my dad and the good-sport and big-hearted Edward, my six-year-old brother. We were poor but homesick and buoyed by a recent move from Winnipeg to Toronto and my dad's first job (as a post-graduate reseacher at the University of Toronto), we decided: enough, let's go home this summer.
On the plane, we happily and without furtiveness nor shame collected all of the small plastic containers that came with our meal trays, whether disposable or not, and stuffed them into my mom's handbag, to serve as holders of buttons, paper clips, and stray screws. We clapped our hands and batted our eyes with shy pleasure at the luxuries of flight.
Walking from the plane into the non-air conditioned airport, the heat was so overwhelming that one suspected it of being, actually, a fire. From the tarmac, it rushed towards us, we swallowed and blinked it into our bodies.
"It's hot!" Eddy whimpered.
"Is the air conditioning broken?" I asked.
But our voices got lost in the heat, and the words wilted in mid-air, sighed not unromantically, and fell dead limply onto the ground.
"Mom, dad?"
They were in another world. My father had been away for nine years. Leaving a country like Canada for nine years is very different from leaving a country like China for nine years, especially if that nine years spanned from 1984 to 1993 and included, sure, a notorious massacre, but also a slow and measured reconnect with the rest of the world. And telephones and colour TVs and the bleaching and tidy perforation of toilet paper. Sky scrapers, bad pop music, taxicabs and forced early retirement from state owned companies.
As children always do, we quickly blended into the new environment. We had our own take on it, and were possibly a little bit snobbish and uppity about the sorry state of public bathrooms in our new summer home, but we began to speak with the rolling accent of native Beijingers and we did what all the local kids do in the summer: take summer classes. Thus Eddy took: swimming, drawing, Chinese chess, kung fu. I took swimming, drawing, kung fu, and god knows what else my mother fit into my schedule. Someone lent us a Chinese video game console and we played American baseball on it. We adopted the mid-day nap habit and got used to not having hot water on tap, as well as the prescence of our nemesis, Duyi, our grandparents' housekeeper and a horrible cook, if not person.
Throughout the summer, a steady stream of visitors came to see us, bringing years' worth of personal histories of acquaintances that needed to be uploaded into my parents' specifically my mom's, consciousness. We visited all the new babies, the old people in their dark dusty apartments and memories. No one had gotten used to the idea of disposable packaging yet, and everyone's apartments in 1993 were overstuffed with colourful empty cardboard boxes with pictures of blenders, tape recorders, and televisions on the cover. In 1986, plastic bags did not exist, we brought our own reusable bags to the vegetable market. In 1993, we had not reached the point, psychologically, of a disposable society, though we had invited disposables into our homes. And so, collectively, as a country, for several years in the mid nineties, our apartments went through a form of constipation. We kept our crap in like nobody's business.
These visits were not simple. People expected us and anyone else who was returning from abroad to come home bearing exotic gifts, based on the fair assumption that we had been visiting a land of ...well, a fantasy land, full of luxuries and easy rewards that were thrust upon us like greatness upon Malvolio. It was true, we had wall to wall carpeting and a wild orgy of Transformers to play with. We had alamgated a wealth of furniture, comic books, and sports equipment from garage sales and dumpster diving. And while the source of our riches was a secret, had they known, they would have only said, "wow, what an amazing place you live in, that people would throw such treasures into the garbage!" And who could argue with that? It was true, one country was more comfortable than the other, as simple as a porridge tasting. But one thing they did not know, and we were also too proud to explain, was the peculiar feeling, in a capitalist society, of socio economic class differences.
So instead of trying to explain these depressing concepts, we and all other returning Chinese prepared suitcases full of small tokens of our new luxurious life, which we gave to our visitors, pushed into their reluctant, shy, desireful hands. Take it take it, it's nothing, don't make us bring it back to Canada!, we'd say, chiding them gently until they stop refusing us and left with a tall bottle of Pert Plus 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner, happily smoothing their flyaway hair down in anticipation.
The stoic Chinese archetype was firmly in place when we had left: don't complain, be generous, were some basic tenets. But people had changed when we were gone, and it felt that they had changed on us. A sort of betrayal like discovering that your child had turned into a teenager when you were out at work.
"I can never come back here," my dad muttered to himself. "I would be eaten alive by these new saavy business types."
And this was true. Our Chinese values had been preserved in Winnipeg for over half a dozen years while China lost its innocence. Even though the purpose of my dad leaving, in the government's eyes, was to pick up knowledge from abroad to apply back at home, even though they thought of my dad as an empty pod, sent out to fish for useful data, to bring back, what actually happened was that they had launched into the sky, via China Air, three Chinese from 1986, and now we'd returned, like time-travelers.
One night the phone rang for me.
"Hello?" I said skeptically.
"Hi, Ying Ying?" a deep smooth voice asked back.
It was First Boyfriend.
While I had left China somewhat precocious (I had a brief affair with an older boy in Shanghai as well, where we stayed for a few days before flying to Canada), I had morphed from the pre-whore six year old into the court jester who hung out with the popular alpha girls who were all at least a foot taller than me, wore dark red lipstick, and, it was rumoured, "had almost done It" on multiple occasions with older, badder boys from other schools. I read a lot of coming of age books and was also extremely proficient, intuitive even, at finding the raunchy sections in Alex's older sister's V.C. Andrews books, which he would steal from her bedroom and sneak into class so that we all huddled in a tight circle between classes, like a ring of hormones, eagerly waitng while I flipped through the book, scanning methodically for key words, until I'd present them with a passage that drew similies between legs and sissors and Mike Naggy would whoop and girls with painted fingernails would squeal in a mixture of delight and disgust. That was me at 13. Harmless and considering Christianity for all the wrong reasons (instant friends, a sense of immediate belonging, unquestioned acceptance). A sharp eye to help the life quest of assimilation, a sharp tongue to scold my family with when we veered to far from that goal. Happy, not particularly ambitious beyond fitting in, and rather simple minded. My phone calls to boys consisted of: hanging up, or asking yes/no questions on behalf of girls with vested interests. I was in love with Luke Perry, though if Jason Priestly insisted, I would probably be able to find him charming as well.
So, sprawled across my grandma's bed, reunited with a forgotten ex, I was reminded of the girl that I had been, the one that snuck up stairs and insisted on partial nudity. And then I became, a little bit, like her, teasing flirtatious, bold and of course, all with a requisite glimmer of dismissiveness, the assessory of every alpha female. I told him all about my classes at the Children's Center, about my summer in Beijing, having to go back in September to, casually, Canada. For a few minutes, I became the girl that I would have been had I not left. I ended the phone call when I got bored with it, refusing an invitation to meet-up since I had class all day, and also because deep down I was probably not ready to meet him and be an alpha female, face-to-sucking-face.
The next day I walked out of art class with a rolled-up painting, probably done in bird's eye view to avoid dealing with angles and proportions.
Sitting outside on a bench was a tall tanned boy. He had the easy, androgenous manner of a man who never had to vie for the attention or approval of women, so much so that he never had to prove his masculinity, and was therefore at ease with his androgeny.
"Ying?" First Boyfriend smiled.
"Huh?"
"Ying? I'm First Boyfriend. You said you take classes here on the phone yesterday."
I looked at his face and saw nothing but what I later learned from Mike Jones, who would be my boyfriend on my second visit back to China five years later, was called a 'pube mustache.' That is, a small sparsely and soft haired concoction arranged earnestly above his upper lip. As if god had been proofreading his creations and paused at First Boyfriend's nose, not knowing whether to keep it or change it, and had in His deliberation, squiggled a faint absentminded but thoughtful line below it. For some reason, it grossed me out.
"Uh yeah, yeah I do," I licked my lips nervously and squinted at something in the distance.
"Well, what are you doing now?"
Certainly not up no stairs, I thought.
"I have to go home, for lunch," I stipulated, relieved that such solid reasons existed. Though they were never an obstacle for us when we were six.
"Where are YOU going?" I asked suggestively.
"Oh I'm going to my Grandma's."
He then revealed that our destinations were not very far from each other at all, and that we would hence walk towards the same bus stop and indeed take the same bus.
We stuffed ourselves into a crowded bus. Chinese buses are not always crowded, but when they are it is a marvel to see how much we want to get to our destinations and how little we care about our personal space. We believe that another person can surely fit into any space with the same happy tenacity that competitive eaters believe that another hotdog can fit into their stomaches.
Up to this point in this long winded story of First Boyfriend, I have been portrayed as a rather reasonable person. Some of my actions may have been childish, but they were always understandable.
Alas, on that crowded bus reunited with First Boyfriend, both of us squished between soft-fleshed men and sun burnt old ladies, barely within each other's peripheral vision, I, gripping tightly my roll of art, went a little mad.
First, I deliberately missed my stop. I did not want First Boyfriend to find out where I lived. My heartbeat increased expoentially as our full bus rumbled farther and farther away from my home and towards, I suppose, First Boyfriend's grandma's home.
At some point, the door opened, and I unpredictably (to myself) wiggled out the backdoor. I looked back and saw First Boyfriend slowly react to my leave and then, twisting his open mouth a little, try to wiggle out after me.
That was my last image of him.
I ran blindly and with a low posture aligning the top of my head with a line of shrubs for no perceivable benefit.
An apartment complex beckoned me into its dark cavernous self and I scrambled inside like a boy or a good soldier. A flight of dark, wide, cement steps greeted me. Outside in the apartment courtyard I could hear First Boyfriend calling my name. I ran up the stairs.
Up and up I went until I got into the attic where strangers stored broken wicker and exta sets of everything. I worked myself into the middle of the attic in a low crouch and listened for footsteps.
"Ying Ying!" and then he tried my nickname, "Bei Bei!"
I looked about wildly. He wasn't giving up as easy as I thought he would. Didn't he know that I had changed, that we could not play the old romance anymore, that my focus and challenge was assimilation, not rebellion? That I had spent the last seven years lying about my parents to the world, rather than lying to my parents about the world? That I did not have the luxury of fitting in so how could I take the next step to stand out? (This, incidentally, is why I think some second generation kids are so boring. Because they got stuck at this step and then sort of got comfortable here.)
I formulated a plan of action. I took off my shirt and put it back on inside out. Then I rolled up my long shorts to make cuffs. I took off my socks. And lastly I took the elastic on my rolled up painting and used it to put my hair up in a pony tail. I took off my hat.
When I had finished doing everything I could think of to disguise myself as a totally different person, I realized that I needed to pee.
Really bad.
The apartment at the top of the stairs had its door open, and I could hear the sound of vegetables being stir fryed, chairs being pushed back and forth around a table, the desparate last round of a video game before its player would be forced to stop to eat lunch.
I tiptoed into the familiar setting, quickly located the bathroom, and slipped in without notice. I peed, washed my hands, dried them instinctively on the damp towel hanging beside the sink, and slipped back out, feeling a slight sadness as if leaving my own home for the last time. I had spent seven years trying, with spotty success, to fit into a rubric on the other side of the world, yet here, where I was born, I could slide seamlessly in and of a complete stranger's home in less than seven minutes.
It was not something that I was old enough to articulate, so I ran out of that building, back into the midday sun, sprinting home with tunnel vision, washing myself of my past.
Labels: memories
