Authors: Jack Livings
When she arrived, he lit a new cigarette. He was thin, had a large mole on his cheek and heavy, reptilian eyelids. She'd been to see him three times the previous week, twice the week before that, and though he'd at first thought she was a bellyacher, he'd come to recognize a familiar loneliness in the way she stacked questions atop one another, fending off the moment when she'd have to leave. It was not unusual for students to develop feelings for their teachers, and he could see from the frequency of her visits that she was experiencing emotions for him. He could not offer the kind of help she seemed to be after. He took his responsibility to the American students seriously, and he adhered to proper interaction boundaries. When Claire brought him oranges from the market, he permitted himself to offer her special-issue postage stamps in return, nothing more. Very recently he'd had a dream about her and upon waking he'd soaked in the memory of her big white thighs before coming to his senses. He fought mightily not to think about that dream.
There was, in fact, a single reason Claire had made a habit of visiting Teacher Wu's office: to pump him for information. It had been killing her that she didn't know why Alicia had moved out. Telling the administrators that they were incompatible wouldn't have been enough. Surely Alicia had fabricated untruths about Claireâthat she stole or didn't bathe or had emotional issuesâand if the administrators believed the untruths, then her teachers knew about them, too, which meant that every day Claire sat in class her teachers knew something about her that she didn't know about herself. Wu must have heard something.
No, nothing, he'd say.
She'd narrow her eyes. Nothing?
I am sorry, nothing. I am always asking.
But on this afternoon, she'd come with a different story. When she told him what had happened in the market, he was outraged. Yet, as she went on about needing her ID card to travel to Beidaihe, he realized that he'd been presented with an opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his colleagues. An immense gift, this robbery. He closed his eyes and reminded himself to breathe. His long, aqueous fingers moved loosely on his legs. Though Teacher Wu did not consider himself a brave man, he was sure he could ignite the tight blue flame of anger flickering within him.
“So you'll get me a new ID,” Claire said.
He rose into a stoop, his head canted in such a way that he looked to be bowing solemnly, and motioned Claire out the door, as there was not room for him to move from his post behind the desk unless she first left the office. Once they'd emerged, he said, “Please follow me.”
Claire had to jog to keep up with him. At Central Administration, a dilapidated building that smelled of wet plaster and ashtrays, Teacher Wu dashed from one pea-green office to the next, gesticulating wildly to the accounting staff, ideology monitors, anyone who would listen. Claire hung back in the hall, and a couple of times she thought to leave entirely, but she wanted to get her ID sorted out. Without Wu, it could take months to get a new one.
There was always some story making the rounds about Uyghurs kidnapping Chinese virgins. They were never above suspicion, hailing as they did from a place so far away from Beijing that it was said the clocks hung upside down. They were diseased and they bred like livestock. Their acts of terrorism had been well documented. Now, finally, Wu told his colleagues, these murderers, these pale-skinned dope peddlers, could be made to suffer. Rapists. Cowards, pickpockets. Robbers of defenseless American female students.
“We must extract the rotten tooth,” Teacher Wu exclaimed. He fell easily into the cadences of zealotry, a strange nostalgia fueling his anger. As a child, he'd marched with his schoolmates, emptied his inkpot over his teacher's head, watched as older middle school students had stuffed their teachers' mouths with dirt. He still had long passages from the Little Red Book rattling around his brain. His colleagues, patriots all, agreed that the Uyghur problem had to be dealt with once and for all. The foreign students had too long been at risk, and it was only a matter of time before one was kidnapped, raped, hacked into pieces.
By the time Wu was done, he'd cleared the building and a crowd of over a hundred administrators had gathered outside. Claire tried to slip away, but Wu grabbed her arm and ferried her to the front. The crowd swept like a mudslide through the college gates, diverting a stream of cyclists into the street, snarling traffic. As they turned onto the wide sidewalk, a traffic cop, whistle bleating, stepped off his pylon, waving his white-gloved hands, then stepped back up, perplexed. The mob was nothing more than middle-aged academics from the language college. They weren't shouting or holding signs. He watched the crowd march up Fucheng Road.
But by the time they breached the front door of the Public Security Bureau, they had worked themselves into a frenzy, and the noise went up like a cannon. They poured into a long room resembling a drained swimming pool, the sound of their voices echoing off the bare walls. A squadron of junior officers who had spent the day slogging through paperwork shot to their feet all at once, their metal chairs clattering across the floor. Most of them would have fled if they'd been able to, but there was nowhere to run. Some of the officers had been students at the School of Foreign Languages and recognized the administrators in the front ranks.
A voice commanded them forward, and the officers complied, running headlong into the crowd, arms extended against the wall of humanity bearing down upon them. Teacher Wu stabbed his finger at the nose of a young officer whose peaked hat had gone sideways on his head, its leather chin strap jogging across his eye. The officer, though attempting to adhere to training protocols by displaying the dispassion of an agent of the state, was churning inside, and his cheeks were flushed a deep crimson. To a man, the officers were scared out of their wits. The administrators had waded into a wave of fresh technical school graduates, a skinny bunch whose collective specialties ran to electronic eavesdropping and code-breaking, all awaiting reassignment, in the meantime cleaning up six months of back paperwork at the Ganjiakou station in Beijing.
Lacking any slogans to chant, the academics targeted individual officers and shouted into their faces, creating an unintelligible wash of noise that only served to further frighten the officers. After a while, the protesters began to feel bad for the young officers, and the mass action lost some of its passion. In the middle of the crowd, administrators looked at one another abashedly, as though they'd been caught in a collective act of masturbation. Their voices waned, and those in the front rank stopped pushing against the officers. Teacher Wu tried to rouse them, but no one seemed interested in taking up the charge.
At the same time, in the rear, some younger administrators, who'd only just arrived after hearing about the protest from colleagues on campus, were trying to make up for lost time, shouting and shoving at those in front of them. Claire, on the front line right next to Teacher Wu, felt the crush of bodies at her back grow more insistent. She braced herself, locked her knees, and tried to set her feet hard against the concrete floor, but she, along with several other administrators, was sliding forward, borne ever closer to the line of officers by the bodies packed tightly around her. Her heart throbbed in her ears, and she tried to lift her arms but they were pinned at her sides. Then her legs became tangled with those of the administrators on either side of her, and she lost her balance, tipping forward into a ruddy-cheeked officer, who backpedaled as if he'd opened a closet door and a rotting corpse had fallen out. Claire hit the floor in a puff of dust.
The fallen administrators quickly picked themselves up, and the crowd backed away, forming a ring around Claire, the human loupe that never failed to materialize at Beijing's car accidents and public heart attacks. The floor was gritty, and she tasted coal dust on her lips. Teacher Wu crouched next to her.
“Now is a good time for you to speak,” he whispered.
“Now?” she said. “Some help?”
He tentatively reached for her arm, and was relieved when two other administrators stepped in and scooped her up by her armpits.
“Where's the officer in charge?” said Teacher Wu to one of the recruits.
“Here,” said the precinct captain, standing off to the side, a smoldering cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.
Teacher Wu pushed Claire forward, forcing her onstage. “Now is a good time for you to tell your story,” he said.
“Careful with the merchandise,” Claire said.
“Speak now,” Teacher Wu said, nodding in the direction of the precinct captain.
She looked around, then started to speak in elementary Chinese, but Teacher Wu stopped her.
“English. Speak English. You are tired. I translate,” he said. “Tell about the Uyghur who robbed you.”
“I didn't see anyone. My bag just disappeared,” Claire said. “I told you that.”
Teacher Wu smiled and looked around at the room magnanimously. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You talk, I translate.”
“All I wanted was a new ID card,” Claire said. “What is all this?”
That blue flame again. Wu turned a grim smile on Claire and then began to relate his version of events to the captain.
The room reeked of sweat and tobacco smoke undercut by the tang of pickled cabbage wafting out of someone's desk drawer. The precinct captain sucked on his cigarette. His face had the heavy quality of wet cloth, and he surveyed the room from behind a monkish brow, his eyes never alighting on any one person for very long, as if committing a pointillist version of the crowd to memory. He had a gift for faces.
Teacher Wu, intent on proving himself worthy to everyone gathered, spoke with his clearest voice.
“Our motherland has failed to protect its children. This neighborhood has become unsafe! University students and foreign guests have been endangered, and now one of the students entrusted to us by the government of the United States has been robbed! We demand action. Illegal influences from the western provinces have taken over! We can no longer walk the streets without fear. How many of us will be attacked before you will act to protect us?”
Wu paused to gauge the administrators' reaction, but especially Claire's.
What beauty, he thought. Even with dirt all over her face and her hair askew, she was a heavenly spirit. She stared back at him impassively, and he understood immediately that of course she couldn't understand a word he was saying, and that even if she could, she wouldn't allow her emotions to surface unless she wanted everyone to know that she harbored romantic feelings for him. Her cold eyes excited him. He knew that beneath her mask of disregard, she was urging him to continue. She never took her eyes off him.
All the administrators were watching him, and he felt alive, electrified, as though delivering a lecture to a packed hall. The PSB officer in charge was watching, too, waiting for him to speak. At last, thought Wu, at last.
He brought his voice to its full register, turning this way and that to address both the administrators and the captain. As he spoke, he allowed his emotions to course freely, until he had broken through the wall dividing self-preservation and martyrdom. Perhaps the government, he said, had planted the Uyghurs to facilitate the neighborhood's downfall so cadres could sweep up land on the cheap. Perhaps local government was profiting from the drug deals. Perhaps PSB officers were on the takeâno one in the room, but an investigation surely would expose graft.
“This is the worst form of oppression,” he shouted, “ignoring the dangers to the Chinese people so that a few cadres can become rich! Look what's happened. A defenseless American student has been attacked. She could have been killed!”
The administrators stood with their fingers locked, eyes on the floor. If only someone would step forward to restrain Teacher Wu, they were thinking. But no one wanted to risk his own skin. Finally, a bold administrator placed her hand on Wu's arm and said, ever so softly, “That's enough.”
The precinct captain had nodded thoughtfully throughout Wu's speech, and now that it appeared to be over, he called to a pair of plainclothes officers posted across the room. They rushed at Teacher Wu, grabbed him, and without ceremony hustled him to a stairway in the back. He twisted and fought, shouting the whole time, “Justice! Justice!” Claire thought he looked like a bug, his legs skittering this way and that. As they reached the staircase, Wu cast a wide-eyed gaze back at her and moaned when he saw that she was content to let them take him away. He went limp and closed the book on another chapter of his mournful life.
“He doesn't speak for the group,” the head of administration said to the captain.
“No one authorized him to say those things,” someone else said. “There was no need for him to go so far in his criticisms.”
The rest stood as silent as children before an unpredictably violent parent, praying to be dismissed without a beating.
“You have all done your patriotic duty,” the captain said, waving his cigarette at the administrators. “We will investigate the allegations. Rest assured, citizens, that your welfare is in the hands of the People's Republic, and your concerns will be met with action!” A few of the protesters nodded in approval. Most were already backing toward the exit. Suddenly a young teacher in a white shirt thrust himself through the crowd and, fist raised, shouted, “Your words are shit! We demand immediate action!”
Two more plainclothesmen grabbed him by the yoke of his shirt, wrestled him to the floor, and dragged him across the room, his flailing legs banging against desks and toppling chairs. By the time they got him up the stairway, he was screaming hysterically, struggling like an animal off to the slaughter. Pens spilled from his shirt pocket and tapped down the concrete steps.
The head of the college Maintenance Department, who'd joined the protest only because he'd been in a meeting at the administration building when Wu had burst in, was muscling his way through the crowd, fighting his way toward the door. “Not involved,” he was saying in a low voice, “not involved.” He threw himself against the heavy door. The exodus was under way.