... and Baby Makes Two (32 page)

“Do you see so many bicycles? In fact, you could almost say that Beijing is the Kingdom of Bicycles.”

We were all nodding and smiling, but really, we were in some kind of shock. It was more than jet lag, but less than culture shock. Everyone in this group has traveled enough to be jaded and smug, but we couldn't muster any smug just then. After all, this was China. China.

James would tell us in English that “Beijing is much larger than your New York City. You will not see it all, but you will see many great and historic sites in our time together.” And then he'd say something very quick and slightly hostile in Chinese to the driver.

Oh, God, the driving. The traffic was terrifying. It was a free-for-all. The Kingdom of Bicycles is in a state of anarchy. Cars blocked grids, switched lanes, and aggressively cut off anyone and anything. And yield at your own peril. So far, every time we have crossed a street has been a stunt from a bad reality show.

James told us that we were the late arrivers.

“Your other Americans were at the Winter Palace today. Tomorrow, you will see the Forbidden City also along with them. It will be beautiful.”

Okay here comes my snobbery. The other Americans in the
group were the non–New Yorkers. They lived in real places that New Yorkers emigrated from and then felt superior to. These people had arrived in Beijing earlier. I was so jealous already.

The hotel is fine, I guess. It's disappointingly Western in every way, except for the large sign in the bathroom that shouts DO NOT DRINK THE WATER!! I've been warned about this on all the listservs. Don't drink it, don't brush your teeth with it, and keep your mouth shut tight in the shower. Got it.

I checked my answering machine at home. There was a message from Peter.

“Jane. If I'd been home, I would have come with you in a heartbeat. I miss you a lot. I hope you got to China okay. I guess since you're not picking up, you must be in China. Or still really mad at me. Or both.”

I must have been still tired and jet-lagged, because I started crying. I love Ray and I want him to be here, but I want Peter too. That's so disloyal to Ray. I can't believe I just wrote it.

So I told Ray I was going to call Peter back. Ray tried to talk me out of it. Aside from the fact that the call itself would cost a semester's tuition at Harvard, what would be the point of returning that call right here right now? He made perfect sense. I dialed the phone.

Got his voice mail. His damn voice mail. It was a sign. I hung up without saying anything, then I told Ray that he was right.

So. We started Project Stay Awake! Why? Because you have to stay awake if you want to get over jet lag. So we all set out for a walk almost immediately.

The Most Surprising Things in Beijing Were:

1. T
   IANANMEN
   S
   QUARE.
   E
   VERYONE TALKS ABOUT IT LIKE IT'S JUST A PLACE.
   P
   EOPLE GO THERE EVERY DAY.
   

2. T
   HE CROWDS.
   R
   EMEMBER,
   I
   LIVE IN
   M
   ANHATTAN, AND THIS CITY MADE ME FEEL LIKE THE COUNTRY MOUSE.
   

3. P
   ETER.
   I
   KEEP THINKING ABOUT HIM.
   I
   KEEP WONDERING WHAT HE
   

would think of this place. He's here in my head. I saw a little boy in split pants. The middle seam of the pants is split open, and little kids are dangled over potties or streets to do their business. And not a pooper scooper in sight. I thought about how I would tell the story to Peter. I need to keep “don't think of Peter” on my to-do list.

James urged us all to come out to dinner with the larger group. He's a real gourmand, and he wants to show off all his favorite restaurants to his guests. Peter would absolutely love this part of the trip. Jesus. I have to stop writing about him.

I don't remember much about dinner. I was too tired for conversation. Before I forget—Ray was right: If he, Peter, and I had all traveled together, we would have freaked everyone out. After a while, I realized that everyone assumed that Ray and I were married and Karen and Charles were married, and that Teresa and Beverly were lesbians. Fine.

Day Two

It wasn't until this morning when we were in the Forbidden City that I really woke up. I am really in China. I am on the other side of the earth, and I'm coming home with a baby. Sorry if my pen slipped there, that last word was “baby” So we toured this amazing place and I studied the architecture so that I could push the b-b-b-baby part of that revelation to one side.

James is so smart. He had us all enter from the North Gate, because most tourists enter from the South. This way, it seemed as if we had the Forbidden City to ourselves for most of the tour.

He asked us if we had ever seen
The Last Emperor.
Most of us had, and I couldn't believe my eyes. This is where the little boy Emperor rode his bike. Remember?

One guy is seeing China strictly through the LCD panel of his video camera. He was adding his own narration to his videotape
and, yes, this is America (or it will be when he watches it), so I guess he can do that. But he still bugged me. When James showed the house of the concubines, the American narration was “and here's where the Emperor kept his bitches.” I think Teresa was actually twitching toward a confrontation, but she must have thought better of it.

The group headed into the Forbidden City Starbucks. It was real. It was in the Forbidden City. Could the Gap be far behind? Did I mention that we saw the Beijing Ikea? We did. It was disturbing.

James gave us an hour to wander on our own, and then we were supposed to reunite at a designated spot. After an hour and some miscellaneous time went by, everyone had returned except for Ray. James shook his head and said, “Jane, where is your husband?”

So I shook my head and said, “James, I have no idea.” It was an honest answer. But one more time, I thought of Peter. I wanted to say, “He's married to somebody else, the dope.” But then Ray snuck up behind us, and we were a couple once again.

Later, James took us all to Tiananmen Square. He was talking about the history of the place, beyond that horrible day in
1989
(and now as I write this, it looks like a long time ago). The soldiers in the square do this slow, dancelike march and I think it hypnotized me. I got pulled out of my trance when I heard a pair of Chinese girls nearby. They were pointing and laughing at our group. James heard them, but he only spoke louder and louder. Then all of a sudden, he turned and spoke sharply to the girls in Chinese. They stopped pointing, smothered their laughs, and looked at the sky. Whatever it was, it was still funny to them. They got all subversive and started pointing and giggling again, but they were quieter. I figured out what was amusing them.

A lot of the people in our travel group are overweight. The girls had been pointing at the heaviest Americans in the group and laughing. I haven't seen any fat Chinese, although I've read about them. For the rest of the day, I noticed Chinese people pointing
and sneering at overweight tourists. The overweight tourists said nothing. I don't know if they noticed it, but it would have been hard to miss.

Day Three

James wanted us all to go out extremely early this morning. “Come to the park and see how Chinese people start the day” It was painfully early and I'll confess here that I hesitated. It will probably be years before I can ever sleep in again. And I love sleep. I told Ray “I might want to sleep some more.”

And he said, “How can you even think about missing this!” He sounded really shocked.

So I was duly embarrassed, but then I told him, “I guess you got all that extra sleep while
I was waiting for you to go to the airport.”

He stopped lecturing me. I plan to use this line until it stops working.

I'm so glad I decided to go. James had us walk to this beautiful park, and on the way we saw people sweeping spotless streets with tiny straw brooms. Some kind of government works program in progress. Cleaning clean streets.

The first group we saw in the park was doing tai chi. It was silent and graceful and serious. Mr. Annoying Video Guy started shouting, “Wax on! Wax off!” until his wife pinched him really hard. I had this vague sense of shame at the discipline I was seeing in front of me. And it only got worse. Then came the calligraphy writers. They dipped large brushes in muddy water, they bent down at the waist, and wrote on the pavement. The floor became a mosaic of Chinese characters. Their work would dry get washed away, and they would re-create it all the next morning. They did this on purpose.

But today's big event was the Great Wall. I have now climbed the Great Wall of China. James told us that the Great Wall can
not
be seen from the moon, but maybe it can be seen by people like John

Glenn who orbit the earth. That's not a lot of people. The best way to see it is to go to it and climb it, and I speak from experience here. I don't know how to describe something this grand, so I'll paste some pictures in the journal here. I got a certificate that announces that I did indeed climb the Great Wall, so lucky, silly me.

When it was time for lunch, James had another great restaurant lined up for us. But some members of the group started shouting out:

“Can't we just get pizza or something?”

“I'm dying for a burger.”

And, the one that made me grimace at my fellow travelers: “Please, anything but Chinese. I'm so sick of Chinese!”

Maybe James has a high pain threshold. If it hurt, he showed nothing. He took us to eat exotic foods instead, promising that it was “tasty, so tasty” Most of the group grumbled, ate rice, and declined a great many dishes. I wanted to compensate for their rudeness by eating everything James ordered. This included things that really didn't want to go down my throat. There were strange sauces, things with bones, and flora and fauna I have never seen before, even on Canal Street. But I ate it just to show the others that it could be done. And my reward, every time and for every dish, was a second helping.

It reminded me of Peter and the new foods he used to get me to try. Peter. Again. Why am I writing about Peter when I'm on the other side of the planet?

Peter is gone and I am in China.

Peter is gone and I am in China.

Peter is gone and I am in China. There.

For the afternoon, James wanted to show us how real Chinese live here in Beijing. The noise, the energy, the commerce all dropped away as we walked. He took us to a courtyard in a residential district. And that's when the smell hit us. If you're eating right now, put it down. Because this was an outhouse smell, amplified by stadium speakers. That's the nicest way to describe it.

Teresa just had to ask, “What is that?” And Karen was covering her mouth, but I could tell that she was gagging. It was really that bad.

James told us that this was the public bathroom, and it seemed the obvious answer. A few hundred people use it every day. After we passed it, the smell began to dissipate, or maybe we grew some tolerance toward it. I stopped worrying that Karen was going to be sick.

“This is middle-class Beijing.” James sounded like a professor. “They have no indoor plumbing. They come here, and that is what you smell. It is bad, isn't it?”

There was a girl, several blocks ahead of us. She was walking toward the group, carrying some small items. Her clothes were light and casual. I thought that she was wearing pajamas. She was. And she was carrying a towel and a toothbrush. How long had she been walking?

James told us, “She is going to the bathroom. Imagine if she is sick in the night. How far must she go?”

He stopped at a gate in a stone wall. He entered and spoke to the residents, leaving us Americans outside for a bit. We barely had time to say, ewww, gross, about the bathroom situation, when James opened the door and signaled us in. We were in a Chinese courtyard.

The ground was paved with a kind of cobblestone. It looked as if we were in a fraction of some grand and wealthy person's ancient home. There were three doors, forming a semicircle around the courtyard. There were plants, bean sprouts, and other vegetation winding around the pillars of some of the entrances. The paint was peeling badly on every door and wall. We skipped the first door. Maybe no one was home. But we were invited to the next home.

It contained two rooms. A living room/kitchen and a bedroom. The living room/kitchen had a yellow velvet couch that was worn but well cared for. A little boy, eight years old, maybe nine, sat there, doing homework. He was too shy to look up. His mother was a tiny woman with high energy. She had a computer; she had nice things.

The bedroom was filled with a giant mattress, where the family slept.

In the next house, we met a small, elderly lady. She was not frail, and her house was not as accessible. The Americans backed away. She consented to photos with the Americans. She took a few pictures of us too.

Is this the life my daughter might have had? Would she have been happy? What would she have grown up to be here? What
will
she grow up to be? Someone stop me before my head explodes.

I felt like such a spoiled, pampered American. And I thought of Pete— I mean, I thought of you know who. P. When he left, it was like someone amputated a limb. But let's be honest here—my life is easy-peasy So the guy left. So what? Get a little sense of perspective, Jane. And grow up.

For the record, the people in the courtyard were happy. They seemed to like their lives. Peter would argue with me here—just for the sake of arguing, because that's how he is and now he's arguing in my head: “What, should they move into condos and eat McDonald's?” No. But they should have flushing toilets. That's all I'm saying.

Shut up, Peter.

Day Four

Today we flew to Guangzhou, where we were to be united with our children, and oh, my God. I didn't tell anyone, but I was praying that we would
not
get the babies that day. I need one more day to get ready. Just one. Please.