Color Wolf

My mother had warned me to watch out for color wolves, but I did not believe her. Maybe as a child I had, when tales of the ghosts that walked the hinterlands still had the force to haunt my dreams. But at twenty-four, I thought of myself as a modern girl—a modern girl in a modern world. All that superstition was a part of the old China that we young Chinese had left behind. I no more believed in color wolves than I did in the ghosts of my ancestors. We might sweep their tombs on Qing Ming Jie, but no one under thirty believed that the spirits were really there. We might make nods to tradition, but the old ways had never set roots deep in our hearts.

I was a medical student in Suzhou that summer. The supervisory doctor needed somebody to go to Fujian province to collect some data on patient care in the rural hospitals. He picked me not because he had great faith in me. It was actually just the opposite. Dr. Li had ten medical students under his supervision. Seven were men, which automatically gave them the top slots in Dr. Li’s mind. Of the three women I was the quietest, and this Dr. Li seemed to equate with stupidity. I think he sent me because he saw me as the most expendable.

“This trip will do you good, Zhang Xiaojie,” he told me. “Maybe it will help you find your tongue. A doctor needs one sometimes, you know.”

That only made it sound like punishment to me, but as with a prisoner who has just received his sentence, I didn’t really have a choice.

It would be more dramatic if I could tell you it was my first time to take such a trip, but I had taken trains by myself many times. My hometown in Jiangxi province is about a twelve-hour ride from Suzhou, and twice a year during my undergraduate days I had made the long journey home, usually alone. The trips were typically weary but uneventful and certainly nothing to fear.

I had bought my ticket a few days before I left. The hospital had given me a little money for travel. In one way, it covered the cost; in another it wasn’t nearly enough. As anyone who has traveled by train in China can tell you, the price of the ticket varies by the level of comfort. If you’ve got enough money to get a sleeper berth, you can read for a few hours and then fall asleep and wake up the next morning near the place you’re going. But if you have to spend the minimum, you end up on a hard seat feeling each shake of the train as it snakes its way through the night. The hospital gave me enough money for a hard seat. I didn’t have the money to move up to a sleeper, so I bought the cheap ticket and braced myself for a long night. I’ve had foreign friends tell me that they would never travel this way, but for Chinese students, it is the usual way, and we only dream of the day we can ride in the sleeper.

The train was set to leave at 8:30 in the evening, and I arrived at the station just under an hour before that. Although the sun had nearly set, the June heat had not lifted, and the skin of the people sitting on the ground outside the building glistened with sweat. The guards herded the crowd through the security check, and I felt the warm flesh of so many bodies pressed together and thought of all the germs passing between us and of all the sickness in the world and of how little a doctor could really do to cure it.

The Fujian train came only a few minutes before the departure time, and all the people who had formed a line at the gate made a dash to the platform, knowing that the margin was slim. As I walked along the train toward car number seven, I saw through the window some passengers at rest on their sleeper car beds. I envied them.

The train began to move less than a minute after I boarded. Car number seven was crowded, with every seat taken and the poorest of travelers, seat-less, stranded on the metal floor between cars like a flock of birds with clipped wings. I found the seat on my ticket already taken by a man with weathered skin sleeping with a straw hat in his lap. I tapped him gently on the shoulder, but he did not stir.

“Duibuqi,” I said and shook him with a little more force. “Zhe ge wo de zuowei.”

He opened his eyes and stood up and joined the other lost birds on the metal floor. He departed with eyes downcast and the deference that had been instilled in him since birth.

That was when I first noticed the color wolf. He was in the seat next to mine with a newspaper half-concealing his face. But his eyes were above the paper and fixed on mine, not on the page. They were wider than the average Chinese man’s eyes and somehow darker, so wide and dark that I could see clearly the doubled reflection of myself in them. The sight made me shudder, though I don’t know why. He dropped the paper into his lap and smiled at me—a smile that was more mocking than friendly. When his thin lips parted, the teeth that emerged were oversized and stained from tobacco. I turned away and sat down and tried not to think of him.

Like so many who travel by train in China, I had brought a simple dinner along—a cup of noodles that could be cooked with the hot water available between cars. I got up to fill my cup. So many passengers were eating in the mid-evening that a noodle scent filled the air—strong enough to drive out the days’ sweat and even the waft of cigarette smoke that floated in from the floor between cars.

When I returned to my seat, the color wolf had folded the newspaper on his left thigh, and he appeared to be sleeping. Yet when the noodles had finished cooking and I began to eat, I had the discomfiting sense of being watched. I looked a little closer and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. He was in the same position, with his legs stretched out and his head back and his arms folded. His eyes were closed, but not fully so. There was there narrowest of gaps at the base of both lids. He was watching me through a screen of lashes.

I lost my appetite and only managed to eat half the noodles. Across the aisle, a group of six students were laughing as they played cards. That made me feel safer—to be in a well-lighted place with others nearby. But the color wolf’s eyes stayed on me, burning like a low bulb that begins to hurt if it’s held for too long near the skin.

Aiming for distraction, I took out one of my medical textbooks and tried to read. The words rushed through my brain and left as quickly as they came in, hardly making an impression. I stole a few glances at the color wolf over my book. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, but it was not tucked in and bore a brown stain the size of a small coin beneath the pocket. His light brown pants were stylishly cut but frayed at the bottoms. He wore sandals rather than shoes, and no socks. On each big toe, a few hairs popped out over the leather. He was lean all over, but his bare arms were muscular and showed that he might have surprising strength. His hair was a little long and disheveled, and above his lips a downy mustache had begun to grow.

Within an hour or so, the card game waned, and most of the players began to nap fitfully. The air in the car was heavy, and sleep floated about like a sickness. Soon, I too drifted off and dozed with my hands folded on the open book. I woke not with a start but with the almost imperceptible sense of being touched. The color wolf appeared to be sleeping beside me. His eyes were fully closed now, and his head tilted to the side, so near to me that his hair brushed lightly against my shoulder.

But it was not his hair that alarmed me, not his hair that stirred me from my sleep. Instead, the color wolf rested with his right arm stretched across his waist and his open palm cupping my hip. I tried to shift away from him, but something restrained me. No matter how much I willed myself to move, my body remained motionless. The color wolf opened his eyes and smiled at me—the same smile I had seen on him when I first took my seat. His hand began to move slowly, around and around my hip in ever widening circles and then down the outside of my thigh until it found the hem of my skirt well below the knee. I trembled all over and struggled to shift away, but I could not break the spell. I felt his fingers begin to crawl up the skin of my inner thigh like the damp legs of a spider.

Suddenly, the train violently shook, and the lights flickered on and off. Had we hit something on the track? The train steadied its course, but the shock of it had awakened the passengers, who now looked about with bleary eyes. The color wolf’s hand had stopped high up my thigh, his fingers stilled by the commotion. The old woman sitting across from the color wolf looked at his hand and then into my eyes. Then she turned quickly away and kept her eyes on the floor.

I don’t know if it was the shaking of the train or the shame that I felt under the old woman’s gaze that set me free. I jumped out of my seat, surprised by the strength I had reclaimed.

“Jiuren! Ni zuo shenme!” I shouted. “Stop! What are you doing!”

The card players looked on with moderate curiosity, peering sleepily at what they probably thought was a lover’s squabble. The old woman stared out the window into the featureless dark. The color wolf smiled at me and twitched his fingers on his knee.

I grabbed my bag and took refuge on the metal floor. It would be the longest night I’d ever spend, standing and shaking through the night. But I could not go back there with the color wolf waiting in his lair. Discomfort was a small price to pay for safety.

The man in the straw hat waited for a while and then, seeing that I had no intention to return, reclaimed the seat I’d taken from him. We Chinese are a resourceful people; what one person discards another will surely treasure. And, as everyone knows that color wolves have little taste for aging men, what had he to fear? He had his seat, and I had my safety. We could both consider ourselves happy.

----------------------------------------------------

This is the way I have told the story the few times that I have told it—to my cousin, to my closest friend, to the Englishman who later became my husband. It is the way I usually tell it to myself. It is mostly true but not wholly so.

Maybe memory works this way, taking raw facts and reshaping them in ways that make it a little easier for us to live with ourselves. My mother warned me to watch out for color wolves, but I did not believe her. I do believe in color wolves now. I believe in them because one still lives within me. They cannot be driven out by something so simple as the shake of a train or an old woman’s gaze. And once a color wolf gets inside you he will never come out. He is with me when I see a certain kind of man on the street—a man who has that look in his eyes, a man with a body that is hungry and lean. He is with me when my husband touches me, taking over my husband’s body, taking over me. He is with me in my dreams.

The old woman's eyes could not break the spell, though she surely saw, the only one who knows besides the color wolf and me. And the shame did not come from the woman’s eyes. It comes from within me, from knowing that I did not/could not/would not refuse his touch and that, intermingled with the horror was—and here I must pause for I can hardly think the words—something much too close to wanting to tell the story whole.

Yao Ming in Reverse

The day after I returned to the US, I went to my neighborhood library to check out some books. After spending eleven months in Suzhou, I found myself drawn by an irresistible force to the library’s holdings on China, as if the books there could reclaim part of what I had loved and left behind. Quickly, I caught a conspiratorial scent in the air. There, along with the usual histories and travel guides, were a half-dozen books written by Americans warning of perils looming to the east, books with titles like China: The Dragon Rises and China: The Gathering Threat.

Perhaps it is my affection for Chinese people individually and collectively that makes me recoil from such texts. I’m too fond of China and the Chinese to begin to be frightened. Besides, while in China, I witnessed how little foreigners sometimes require to see signs of danger. There’s a popular Olympic t-shirt that people are wearing in China these days. The text on the shirt reads, “One China, One World, One Dream.” More than one foreigner has commented to me that this slogan proclaims China’s desire to take over the world. I find the conclusion highly dubious, for world conquest usually requires a little subtlety. If China truly aspired to conquer the world, it probably wouldn’t announce the intention on mass-produced t-shirts. Regardless, I’ve been too busy coming to terms with a real conspiracy to divert much attention to one that is largely fictitious.

It all happened because I am tall--that, and still mobile enough to play a little basketball. I have long arms, can shoot near the basket with my right or left hand, and can even hit a three-point shot now and then. In America, this adds up to mediocrity, and I’ve occasionally known how it feels to be the worst player on the court. But in China, the package made me a monster, a kind of Yao Ming in reverse. But as I recently discovered, excelling at something in a foreign country sometimes comes with a cost: a metaphorical if not literal pound of flesh.

Although basketball is an American invention, the sport is far more popular at present in China than it is in the United States, especially among students. At the college where I work in the US, I would sometimes go to the gym looking to get in a pick-up game and end up shooting free throws by myself. I never had a similar problem during my year in China. I lived a short bike ride from the campus of Suzhou University, where just about any time of day dozens of courts would be full of Chinese men playing basketball. On a clear and not so hot day, so many would be playing that it might take a while to get in a game. Even after the big snowstorm in February, the students had swept the court of snow and were playing again within a few days, braving the cold and the occasional patch of ice.

While there were a few other foreigners teaching and studying at the university, I never met another one on the basketball court. This, along with my height, made it impossible to blend in. The average Chinese man is seven or eight inches shorter than I, which meant that I was often guarded by players whose crowns came up to my chin. Sometimes I matched up against men close to my height--and, once, against one even taller--but typically my size gave me such an advantage that my shots were hardly contested. My worst enemy many days was myself.

You might think a tall waiguoren scoring at ease would breed resentment in China, but that was not initially my experience--at least not on the surface. Only once was an opponent openly hostile. This occurred when an undersized player grew increasingly frustrated with guarding me. Suddenly he accused me of throwing an elbow at him. In fact, he had run face-first into my back, and I could still feel the impact on my shoulder blade. When I told him so, the guy stormed off the court in the middle of game and sat sulking on his e-bike for an hour while I continued to play. As soon as I’d had enough, he began playing again. As in all things Chinese, I am limited, and talking trash on a basketball court is no exception. Da bao bao was all I could think of to say--big baby. In eleven months in China, that was the only occasion I had to attempt an insult, however feeble and ineffectual.

Generally, though, the Chinese players were welcoming and friendly, inviting me to play with them and peppering me with questions in the hybrid tongue of Chinglish. Sometimes we exchanged cell phone numbers and called in advance to meet and play another day. Mostly, though, I rode up alone and joined a game wherever I could find one, playing often enough that many strangers met in this way later became acquaintances and casual friends.

Beneath the friendly façade, however, danger lurked. With increasing frequency, my opponents employed the defense known in the NBA as “hack-a-Shaq.” The strategy first developed as a means to exploit Shaquille O’Neal’s terrible free throw shooting. At 7’2” and more than 300 pounds, Shaq is nearly unstoppable close to the basket. However, from fifteen feet away at the foul line, he’s worse than most schoolboys. So teams took to clobbering him every time Shaq had the ball, knowing that the odds were pretty good that he’d miss the foul shots. The strategy works even better in pick-up games, where there are no free throws, and it’s impossible for a player to foul out. On the playground, “hack-a-Shaq” has all the benefits with none of the costs.

As the spring semester went on, I found myself defended in this fashion quite often, practically tackled whenever I touched the ball. There were games when I never managed to lift my hands over my shoulders--a Gulliver in shorts bound up by Lilliputians. And then the injuries began, always inflicted with a smile first and apology afterwards. First, it was a black eye, or a panda eye, as the Chinese call it. Perhaps fearing that I’d be out of balance that way, another player blackened the other eye. Then a boy threw the ball in my face, nearly crushing my nose. My glasses were broken, and I started to play blind. One week in May, I played three days and suffered in succession a panda eye, a dislocated finger, and a sprained ankle. I had cuts and bruises on my arms and legs, scratches on my face.

It was all was too much to be coincidental. I imagined secret meetings in which my opponents parried over who would hit me where. Surely someone from the Party was calling the shots. At Suzhou University, the Chinese had reopened the Boxer Rebellion, and this time they were winning. Somebody had decided one foreign devil had go down.

So when I witness others indulging in conspiracy theories about China, I’m not impressed, for I have been the target of a real one. I’ll leave it to others to find a subtext of danger in slogans like “One China, One World, One Dream.” I’m just happy that I made it out of China alive.

Suzhou Blues Revisited

In late January, I posted an essay on this blog called “Suzhou Blues II.” Today, back in Baltimore, I re-read that essay for the first time in a long time. Maybe the mid-point of any long journey lies at the nadir of an arc that ascends twice: one arrives, rises on the crest of the new, tumbles, recovers, and rises again. In any event, for me, the “Suzhou Blues” essay documented the low point of a nearly eleven-month stay in China, and it gives the false impression that I was miserable much of time in Suzhou. Misery, as you will see, was the exception rather than the rule, and now that I’ve returned to the U.S., it’s time to take stock of what I learned from the experience.

Adaptability

Through living and working in China for almost a year, I’ve discovered that I am quite adaptable. I went to China alone, speaking only a little bad Chinese and knowing only a handful of people--most of whom I knew well enough to call acquaintances but few of whom I could call friends. From this spare beginning, I made a life for myself in Suzhou, riding my bicycle each morning through sun, rain, and snow to the bus stop to Wenzheng; bargaining for vegetables in the market with my garbled Chinese, eating with chopsticks like an old China hand; witnessing a culture that had once seemed foreign and strange become familiar and friendly to my eyes; forming close friendships across cultures, friendships that transcended cultural difference, that were in fact energized by a recognition that difference and commonality can exist simultaneously when people have hearts and minds big enough to hold them both.

There’s a lot of discussion these days in the West about how China is changing, and perhaps the survival of an individual as much as that of a nation depends on adaptability. Once disparaged by Westerners as “the sick man of the East,” China is now on a course of rapid economic growth that has aroused both admiration and fear. Regardless of the reaction, China’s capacity to adapt is undeniable. In just thirty years, China has utterly transformed itself; over the course of sixty years, it has done so twice, moving from Japanese occupation and civil war to Maoism to capitalism with Chinese characteristics, all within the ordinary span of an individual life. Maybe there is something infectious about such adaptability, for I feel it within myself, too. I arrived in China a sick man of the West with a wounded heart and returned home with a restored capacity for hope. Life in China was varied and interesting to me, and I rediscovered a talent for friendship that I once had as a child but assumed I had forever lost. The true test of these changes, however, comes now, back in America, without the charms of place to prop me up. My fate, like that of China itself, still hangs in the balance.

In the last paragraph of “Suzhou Blues II,” I offered an embarrassingly quick overview and dismissal of Albert Camus’s use of the Sisyphus myth as a metaphor for life. I closed by suggesting that I might be better off finding another metaphor. Perhaps now, in noting parallels between the adaptability of nations and of individuals, I have found one. People who resist change, like nations, drown in the sea of their own defects. Those who adapt change and grow--sometimes painfully so--and in the process reinvent themselves.

Necessity

By American standards, my life in China was almost Spartan. I lived in a room that might generously be called an efficiency apartment and less generously simply a room. It had a tiny kitchen with cabinets that opened at chest-level (for me). The water in the kitchen and bathroom would shut off on a whim, though I fortunately avoided being caught tall and dry with shampoo in my hair or soap on my skin. The bed was a queen, and the room had three hard wooden chairs but no recliner or couch. The desk by window was long, but soon after I moved in, I had covered every inch of it with papers and books, concealing the faux-wooden surface.

The room was on the fourth floor and overlooked a parking lot, but I still liked to sit outside on the balcony on cool nights and play my cheap Chinese guitar in the moonlight. And everywhere there was dust; it filtered through the air conditioning fixtures and laid claim to the room; it blackened the white tiles on the balcony floor; I can only imagine what it has done to my lungs.

This was all that I had for nearly a year, and I never found myself wanting more. I hadn’t known there would be a washing machine in the bathroom, and I’d stuffed the wardrobe too full of clothes. I often found myself wishing I had less. Some of my old clothes and even my sneakers I wore to threads and threw away when I moved out. My two suitcases were lighter when I departed than they had been when I arrived.

For nearly a year, I didn’t drive a car and never once had the desire to do so. I got around Suzhou by bicycle and bus and on foot and traveled between cities by train. I didn’t spend a penny on gas in eleven months, and a single trip on a Suzhou bus typically cost one yuan--about 15 cents.

My salary was about $600 USD a month, and I never felt exploited or underpaid. The school provided my room for free, and, despite traveling frequently within China and eating out on average four or five times a week, I managed to return with quite a bit of cash in my pocket.

I’m writing this now in my old house in Baltimore, feeling a little weighted down by things, knowing as I do now how little I really require, and how believing that I need more is a kind of disease.

Happiness

For a long time, I was a skeptic of happiness and assumed that smiles were ill-omens in disguise. Perhaps this stemmed in large measure from sharing my life with another depressive. If I could not make her happy, at least we might be united in our gloom. In China, there were no rewards for unhappiness, which made it much easier to let the mood pass.

This ability to let go brightened my life in almost every respect. It made me receptive to friendship, pulling me out of myself in proportion with my willingness to let others into my life. It enabled me to find pleasure in my work. During the spring semester, I actually found myself enjoying teaching and the rapport I had developed with my students--even if I never did learn all their names. For the first time, I felt no anxiety about walking into a classroom, nor did I need to survive the semester by counting the days till its end. For the first time, I was genuinely sad to see the last day come. Maybe that sensation is a marker of happiness--the desire to linger a little longer in the moment rather than to escape from it.

Words

I began this blog with an entry in which I wondered who would read it. I’ve always sensed that my readership was small, and I sometimes feared that it was nonexistent. There were days when that sense stifled my desire to write, but I always found a way to push on, even when I believed that it mattered to no one but me whether I did so or not.

In the end, that was reason enough, for writing such as this is as much about discovery as it is about communication. Through writing, I discovered much about both China and myself, and working in the medium of words enabled me to bring clarity and order to a jumble of thoughts, impressions, and emotions. I do hope others were able to take pleasure in and gain meaning from what I’ve posted here, but, in retrospect, I can see that the words have inherent value to me regardless. Anything beyond that is appreciated but by no means a necessity.

Note: This entry is a kind of conclusion, though there are a few unfinished entries that I may work on and post in the weeks ahead. Even though I’m no longer in China, China is still very much within me.

Goodbye to Suzhou

Back in late April, I wrote a song about leaving Suzhou, as I did in actuality yesterday. It features some pretty fast finger picking, with a melody that echoes Pachabel’s Canon (though here in the key of C). The title is “Goodbye to Suzhou,” and it expresses an anticipatory grief over parting from what I’ve come to like about living in China. Maybe the lyric is a little sentimental, but it has some nice imagery, too.

In about an hour, I composed parts for two guitars, bass, and two voices, along with the lyric. Creativity like this is truly is a gift. I don’t know where the song came from; I only know it came to me. I say this not because I think the song is great but instead because I partake in the wonder of making something out of nothing, as all creative people do. In this small way, if only for a moment, we are like gods of a lesser order.

I’m leaving Suzhou today
with a box of words
and pockets full of blossoms
such as friends
whose fathers worked the land
with weathered hands
that are as wise as Lao Zi.

Goodbye to Suzhou--
I won’t see you anymore.

I’ll remember women’s slippered feet
walking on the stone streets
by the water
and how the sunlight
wedded with the stones
and sparkled noontime
in a boatman’s eyes.

Goodbye to Suzhou--
hello to Baltimore.

In Maryland, there’ll be
baseball games and crab cakes,
shopping malls and car jams on the beltway
and addicts staring
with their jaundiced eyes,
standing on those
hope-deserted corners.

And I’ll dream of Suzhou
on the streets of Baltimore.

Grand Theft Bicycle

In life as in literature, foreshadowing is obvious to the obtuse only in retrospect. Looking back, I should have known that the joke Liru told me the day she helped me buy my bicycle last fall carried with it an undercurrent of doom. The joke went something like this…

A man who wanted to make certain that no one would steal his bicycle put ten locks on it and a sign taunting any prospective thieves as well: “I’d like to see you steal this bike!” A thief passing by read the sign and took offense. He bought an eleventh lock and clamped it on, along with a sign of his own: “I’d like to see you try to ride it!”

Perhaps I should view the theft of my own bicycle this spring as a kind of blessing, for I couldn’t say that I had truly lived in Suzhou for a year unless I’d lost at least one. Such a loss is a bonding experience, and now, after having my first bike stolen, I’m practically a native.

It was only after bemoaning the loss of my bicycle that I discovered just how prevalent such theft is in Suzhou. My tutor Yuanyuan has had five bikes stolen during her years of study and work in this “Venice of the East.” Zhou, my contact at the foreign affairs office, noted that he and his wife and child had lost eight bicycles to thieves in recent years. Then there was the Chinese teacher I met on a trip to Wuxi who had ten stolen in a single year. At that point, I think I would conclude that the universe did not intend for me to own a bike, but my new friend wasn’t deterred. He bought an eleventh and was still able to laugh about it when he told me the story. Maybe laughter in such circumstances is the only way to stave off despair. As the comedian Chris Rock once noted, comedy is the blues for people who can’t sing. This must explain why there are so many bicycle theft jokes circulating in Suzhou these days.

The high rate of bike theft is perplexing, as the crime here is negligible in other respects. I feel perfectly safe walking alone anywhere at any hour in Suzhou--a claim that I surely couldn’t make about my home in the US, Baltimore, where a short stroll alone through some neighborhoods at night would not be far removed from suicide. The low crime rate derives in large measure from China’s harsh penal code. China leads the world in executions, and the country has more than sixty capital offenses. Evidently, bicycle theft isn’t among them and has slipped through the cracks of the code altogether.

For about a week after my bike was stolen, I tried to make do on foot. I quickly discovered just how dependent upon my bike I had become. I mourned its loss like that of an old friend. Getting anywhere took four or five times longer, and I was deprived of a cooling breeze just as the return of the Suzhou heat had made it necessary again. I concluded that I could not go on this way. However, I would not make the same mistake twice.

Back in September, Liru had convinced me to buy a new rather than a used bicycle on the grounds that I could avoid having to make costly repairs along the way. This proved true enough, and at about $50 USD, the cost of a new bike was hardly exorbitant. My new bike had a spiffy purple paint job and an eye-catching Phoenix label on the frame. And, aside from needing a new chain, the bike proved very reliable, requiring no other repairs during the seven months that I owned it. But what I hadn’t counted on was that all that made the bicycle attractive to me would make it attractive to others as well, including the thief who eventually stole it. For my second bike in China, I decided to look for that special bicycle, one just barely good enough to get me around but so bad otherwise that a lock would be superfluous.

It didn’t take long to find such a bike, and it cost me only $7 USD. Or at least that was the cost upfront. My battered bicycle has rust on the frame, rust on the rims, rust even on the spokes. The rust on the back fender is so severe that it severed the metal and made a terrible racket when the fender collapsed on the tire the day that I bought it. I solved that problem by rigging the fender in place with a twisted clothes hanger. I sometimes see people laughing at that when I pass by, but this bicycle was not bought to win beauty contests. The handlebars are bent and give the impression that I’m constantly turning. The breaks squeak well enough, but their bark is better than their bite. At best, they only slow me down, and coming to a complete stop requires a firm drag of the feet. This has led to a few harrowing moments on mornings when I’m running late to catch the Wenzheng bus, racing down the Dongwu Bridge and praying to Christ, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Mao that no one gets in my way.

My Chinese friends call a bicycle like mine a tank, just as Americans call a used car that’s backfiring or dragging its muffler down the street a bomb. Tanks and bombs share the trait of needing a combination of ingenuity and cash to keep them going. This has been true of my tank as well, and, unfortunately, most of the problems have been beyond my powers to solve by twisting clothes hangers. It all began a few minutes after I bought the bike. My friend Yimin had come with me to help if I needed translating during the purchase, and, as she departed, I told her to wish me good luck on my maiden voyage. I’d not pedaled more than ten feet before the chain fell off. A worn-out crank was the culprit and had to be replaced. Soon the treadless front tire and its dry-rotted tube had to go, followed by the back inner-tube as well. Then, a couple of close calls on Dongwu Bridge convinced me something really had to be done about those brakes. The new brake pads do help, though a little foot-dragging is still required.

All told, the cost of repairs has already exceeded the original price. You might think I have regrets, knowing that I could have spent my money more wisely and bought a better bike to begin with, but I’m not complaining. In Suzhou, there’s inherent value in having a tank that no one would want to swipe. Rusted frame and rusted wheels, bent handlebars and fenders hanging by a metal thread: these are features money can’t buy and no thief will touch. Who, in the waning weeks of his year in China, could ask for anything more?

Return to Yangzhou: A Farce in Two Parts

Given the trauma my digestive system suffered during my first trip to Yangzhou, it may surprise you that I had any desire to go back at all. However, I try be open to new experiences, especially with Chinese friends, as much of what I learn about Chinese culture comes from simply being present within it. Even so, when my teacher and friend Yuanyuan called and invited me to spend the weekend in Yangzhou with her husband and some of their friends, I hesitated, fearing that I might feel a bit out of place, the only foreigner among seven close Chinese friends. I decided to go in the end, though, as I knew pretty much what would happen if I spent the weekend in my room. Yangzhou had the lure of the unknown on its side, and in the end it delivered.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Sing Karaoke

The sense of being the outsider was most pronounced at dinner on Friday night. My Chinese friends had gone to college together and hadn’t seen one another for a while. There were innumerable toasts, and the more my Chinese friends drank, the less English they spoke, and the more invisible I became. I have trouble understanding Chinese in any context, so, not surprisingly, Chinese in slurred speech proved quite impossible for me. In the end, the two words I could comprehend may have been the only ones that mattered: gan bei! (Empty your glass!)

The evening improved for me when we left the restaurant and went to a KTV bar. You in America may not appreciate what a national institution karaoke has become in China, and in other Asian countries as well. There are many hundreds of KTV bars in Suzhou, and singing karaoke is the favorite social activity among most young Chinese. Each bar includes dozens of private rooms, where friends gather and sing, usually with enthusiasm and sour notes in equal measure. The song lyrics scroll across the large-screen TVs, along with often incongruous images. Last summer, for example, I sang “Roxanne” to a series of clips from The Shawshank Redemption. I don’t recall a prostitute in that film, nor a prison in the song.

Waiters will bring food and drinks on demand and, in the shadier establishments, I’ve been told, prostitutes and drugs as well. The friends who took me to my first KTV bar in Nanjing two summers ago described such places as “unwholesome KTV.” A couple of things made me think that perhaps the KTV bar we patronized in Yangzhou may have been a bit on the unwholesome side. The place had dozens of young women in skimpy black dresses lurking about, saying “hello” as I passed them in the hall. I noted a whole room full of them, in fact, waiting for something or someone. Then when I went to the restroom, a KTV employee surprised me by putting a hot towel on my neck and proceeding to give me a neck rub as I stood at the urinal. I was so stunned that I remained speechless the first time. I don’t think of myself as homophobic, but the last thing I want while my privates are out for a breath of unfresh air is for a strange man to start giving me a massage. The second time I visited the bathroom, I was ready for him. He approached with his hot towel and slightly leering smile. “Bu yao,” I said. (Don’t want). Sometimes, at such critical moments, even a little Chinese is enough.

As always there were plenty of English songs for me to sing, and I was able to sing a couple of challenging ones, including Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” In light of the Chinese government’s distorted coverage of the unrest in Tibet and the apparent willingness of many Chinese to swallow the distortions whole, I couldn’t help but think of a political subtext to the lyrics: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.” I managed to go up a whole octave for the word “suffer,“ hitting a note I hadn’t known was in me. My Chinese friends clapped at that, fortunately unable to read my mind.

My favorite moment, however, had to be singing the Beatles’ “Revolution,” in particular the lines, “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” I commented to one of my Chinese friends that “Revolution” had to be one of the only Western pop songs to mention Mao. I heard him repeat my observation, with minimal accuracy, to a friend who had not caught my words over the blaring speakers: “He said that the Western singers admire our Chairman Mao.” Ah, to be in China at such a moment…

Storming Normandy in a Dragon Boat

The next day, we went to Shou Xihu Gongyuan (Thin West Lake Park)--the most beautiful and famous spot in Yangzhou. I had visited the lake in November, but it is much lovelier in spring, with thousands and thousands of flowers in bloom. But with the flowers come the people--at least ten thousand, I would guess. In November, the place was nearly deserted and quite peaceful, so I guess congestion is the price we must pay for beauty in a country of more than a billion.

Speaking of price, the entry fee for the park led to a comic adventure. My Chinese friends thought that the admission fee was too high (90 yuan, or about $13), so they concocted a plan to lower the price. Two of them bought tickets and entered the park. They told me to wait with the others outside the gate. Then they rented two pedal-driven dragon boats, pedaled them out of the park, and picked the rest of us up outside the gate, on a bank concealed by an old stone bridge. After we’d floated back into the park, a man on the bank noticed that boats that formerly carried only one person now held four and started shouting at us in Chinese and gesticulating for us to come to shore. We pedaled harder and out of his view, but I saw him talking into a hand-held radio before I could see him no more. Soon, a police boat approached, and one of my Chinese friends went into a panic, certain that we’d all be going to jail. I found myself thinking about a report I’d heard earlier that week on NPR that cited China as the world leader in executions and noted that the country had sixty capital offenses. I wondered if illegally entering a park by boat might be among them. But the police craft went right past us, and we jumped to the shore inside the park, leaving just one person in each boat to pedal back to the dock.

I’m amazed that I at least wasn’t apprehended; I would have been easy to find. Of the ten thousand people in the park, I believe I was one of two foreigners, and the only other foreigner I saw all day was a woman of less-than-average height. How hard would it have been to find the tall waiguoren in the red cap, the one person in the park with blue eyes? It all made for a memorable entry. Who ever recalls simply buying the ticket and walking through the gate?

Yuanyuan had been in the other boat, and later she me that she and her party had been greeted with a hero’s welcome when they stepped ashore. An old man had seen us loitering by the canal outside the gate and had wondered what we were up to. He happened to be walking by the water when Yuanyuan’s boat came ashore inside the park. He began to clap with mock admiration. “You are storming the beach at Normandy,” he said. “Hurrah! Hurrah!” This landing, however, was uncontested, with no Germans in bunkers firing down, just thousands of flowers in bloom, and a sea of Chinese within which I somehow managed to lose myself.

Golden Lotuses

I must confess that I sometimes catch myself staring at my students’ feet. Let me be perfectly clear: this happens not because I’ve stayed in China long enough to develop a foot fetish. Besides, the mass foot fetish is mercifully a thing of the past in a China where footbinding is now unknown. The practice was banned with uneven results after the fall of the Qing in 1911 and later was one of the “olds” driven out forever by Mao—this one for very good cause. Though my students’ feet tend to be small, they are naturally so. No, these feet hold my gaze because they remind me that the demographics of my classes at Wenzheng College bear witness to a social transformation that approaches the miraculous. More than ninety percent of my students are young women, and this in a country where little more than a half century ago illiteracy bound the minds of ninety percent of women and girls as surely as custom bound their feet.

Women in China have a long history of experiencing bindings of various kinds. Most famous are the “golden lotuses” or “golden lilies,” as bound feet were euphemistically called. Lately, I’ve been reading The Great Chinese Revolution by John King Fairbank, a frustrating book full of insights and interesting details but written in a style that makes it feel like penance to read. However, even cumbersome prose has the power occasionally to give one pause, if not steal one’s breath. Fairbank’s five-page overview of the history of footbinding had such an effect on me. Fairbank describes in excruciating detail the painful process of footbinding as well as its cultural impact in China generally and on women in particular. But it is a sentence noting the scale of the practice that left the deepest impression on me: “First and last one may guess that at least a billion Chinese girls during the thousand-year currency of this social custom suffered the agony of footbinding and reaped its rewards of pride and ecstasy, such as they were” (Fairbank 71).

At least a billion Chinese girls. Just the size of the number is sobering enough. A billion Chinese girls. That’s something akin to the entire population of China today hobbling about on bound feet. A billion Chinese girls. A haunting figure, but human suffering, for me, is measured best not in sums but instead in the lived experiences of individuals. That’s when it really gets to me—when I think of the individual pain of those billion Chinese girls. To comprehend this, we must reflect for a moment on what it meant to have one’s feet bound.

Typically, the process of footbinding began when a girl was somewhere between four and seven. The earlier the binding was initiated, the less severe the pain, but the pain was severe in every instance:

A girl’s foot was made small, preferably only three inches long, by pressing the four smaller toes under the sole or ball of the foot in order to make it narrower. At the same time it was made shorter by forcing the big toe and heel closer together so that the arch rose in a bowed shape. As a result the arch was broken and the foot could bear no weight except on the heel. (Fairbank 71)

Each of the girl’s small toes was broken in the process and forced by the increasingly tight wrappings to bend down under the foot, driving the broken arch up into the desired lotus shape. I can scarcely imagine the pain this must have entailed, but the initial deformation of the foot was just the opening act of a lifetime of suffering for a woman with bound feet:

After the first two years, the pain lessened. But constricting the feet to a three-inch size was only the beginning of trouble. By this time they were very private parts indeed and required daily care, washing and manicuring at the same time that they had to be kept constantly bound and shod night and day. Unmanicured nails could cut into the instep, bindings could destroy circulation, blood poisoning or gangrene could result. (Fairbank 72)

Like most oppressive practices, footbinding was supported by an ideology that infiltrated the minds of the empowered and the disempowered alike. In fact, it sometimes made them hard to distinguish. Ironically, the actual binder of a girl’s foot was a trusted female relative, typically her mother or grandmother. And in the late-19th and early 20th century, when efforts to abolish footbinding gathered force in China, women with bound feet sometimes were the reformers’ staunchest foes. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as no one had more invested in footbinding than they—few people will immediately embrace a view that requires them to conclude that their own suffering has all been for naught.

While women may have been responsible for the literal binding of a girl’s foot, the figurative binders were men, and the custom could have evolved into a norm only in a culture that was already deeply patriarchal. Classical Chinese erotic manuals suggest that women with bound feet gained sexual hypersensitivity, but such manuals were written by men for men, and the source of the purported “advantages” for women was likely the male imagination rather than the experience of any real women. Ultimately, footbinding revealed far more about the interconnection between male desire and power than anything else. A woman with bound feet was a housebound woman, a nearly immobile woman, a dependent woman, a woman who would always be small and something akin to a child. Footbinding, then, was an extreme form of eroticizing the subordination of women.

Footbinding disempowered women in terms that are easy to see and—from our vantage today—almost a reflex to oppose. The binding power of illiteracy is more insidious because it is hidden, more difficult to drive out because it is more difficult to see. Yet the binding of women’s minds in China shares a common cultural origin with the binding of their feet. The old Chinese saying, “A talentless woman is a virtuous women,” points toward the connection. Denying education to women, like binding their feet, immobilized women and inhibited their potential for growth.

The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 offered the promise of change for Chinese women. In the early years of the PRC, Mao asserted that “women hold up half the sky” and instilled laws in support of gender equality—measures that ran counter to the patriarchal currents of traditional Chinese culture. To a large extent, the PRC has delivered on that promise, and the opportunities available to women in China today are unprecedented and would have been difficult to imagine a half-century ago. Even so, the promise has not been completely fulfilled, for the currents of tradition are strong, especially in rural areas. Only in the large cities has China come close to meeting its goal of universal literary, and a gender gap in the literacy rates of men and women has been present throughout the sixty-year history of the PRC. Even today, about fourteen percent of Chinese women are illiterate, compared with five percent of men. Granted, fourteen percent is a striking improvement over ninety, but the nearly ten-point gap between men and women is telling.

Highly educated Chinese women confront their own barriers as well. If women in the West still come up against the glass ceiling, women in China face something similar, though the glass here is tinted red. In both the governmental bureaucracy and the growing private sector, men continue to dominate high-level positions of power and influence. And the exceptional woman who rises to such heights pays a cultural price for her success. Women perceived as choosing career over family are disparagingly called “dragon women.” Perhaps such labels do the greatest harm not to the women so labeled but instead to girls and young women who’ve yet to choose their course in life. The phrase “dragon woman” is as much a warning as an indictment, an assertion that a woman ought not set her sights so high. Not surprisingly, no one ever speaks of dragon men.

Despite these constraints, I feel hopeful about the future for women in China, and my students surely contribute a great deal to this hope. At the beginning of the semester last fall, I asked the students to fill out information cards that included a question about career goals. The young women in my classes expressed a wide range of aspirations. They want to become translators, executives, educators, officials. Many also noted they wish to travel the world. That’s quite a shift in a culture where bound feet once prevented a billion women from aspiring to leave their own homes. Calling bound feet “golden lotuses” was always a misnomer, for the practice stunted growth and nipped lives in the bud. This is what I think about when I look at my students’ feet: in China, the lotuses are only just now beginning to bloom.

Work Cited

Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985. Singapore: Harper Perennial, 1987.