THE LAKES OF BEIJING
An excerpt from the novel
by Philip J Cunningham
After word of Huamei’s affair started to make the rounds, the last thing I expected was a phone call from her husband. And I guess the last thing he expected was for me to answer my own phone, because after getting me on the line, he parried with me as if I were hired help, some kind of office aide or operator.
My habitual practice of answering the phone in Chinese probably contributed to the confusion:
“Wei?”
“Hello Sir?”
“Wei?”
“May I, uh, er. Is this Uni-ver-si-ty Fo-reign Ex-pert Buil-ding?”
“You got it.”
“May I connect to American English teacher?”
“Um. Speaking. Hello?”
“Hello?”
“It’s me, if it’s me you are looking for.”
He never got around to introducing himself, but his voice was distinctive enough, and his grasp of English weak enough that I quickly put two and two together. The Crimson Prince was trying hard to be polite, but trying even harder to keep it in English, which was strange. After about five minutes of creative listening, I got the gist of his message.
If I didn’t mind the inconvenience, and could, on short notice, arrange an opening in my busy schedule, it was requested that I join him for dinner at a small dining establishment near his home where he could practice English while we enjoyed some regional comestibles. Agreed?
What the? Well, why not?
I thanked him, accepting the invitation.
My first impulse was to call Huamei, so I picked up the phone as soon as I hung up with him, but my second impulse, following closely on the tail of the first, was not to call Huamei, so I put the receiver down again.
The arrangement by which I taught English to her husband had been set up by her, and it wouldn’t have happened otherwise, but there was no pressing reason why I had to consult her or report back to her every time he and I met to discuss our P’s and Q’s. In fact, my sole private student had missed so many weekly lessons in a row I had assumed our little tutoring arrangement was over for good.
I had fully expected my informal course in “diplomatic English” to collapse outright the day his wife’s extracurricular exertions became public, so it stirred a mix of consternation and curiosity, and it was almost moving, to think he still wanted to meet.
Was he really looking to resume lessons? Whatever for? His English was going nowhere fast, despite my trying every teaching trick I knew. He was an agreeable but somewhat inert and otherwise indifferent student whose inability to make progress lent an almost surreal air to the pronunciation drills.
Every day was the first day of class, it was like starting over, over and over again. I never had to do much prep because he seemed to forget everything we went over in the last session, and I could easily fill the follow-up hour repeating the basic grammar patterns and tongue twisters that eluded him the first time around.
Not a bad deal for a penny poor instructor who wanted to clock some easy hours, but it challenged my self-esteem as a supposedly professional teacher of English that he wasn’t getting better at it.
At the university I had plenty of high-achieving students who advanced at warp speed, assiduously memorizing vocabulary lists and voraciously absorbing each day’s lesson. I couldn’t take credit for the fire that burned inside them, but it was nice to see them shine.
Likewise it wasn’t fully my fault that my bright, competent and alert private student found himself so flummoxed by things unChinese that foreign words slipped away like water off a duck’s back, but that’s the way it was with him.
So why did he want to meet?
Might he have an urgent international conference coming up? His first trip abroad? If so, I could certainly prepare a customized lesson for survival English, not that the head of a high-level delegation buffeted with interpreters and security aides needed much English to survive.
But wait. Did he really say, “regional comestibles?”
His dictionary-derived request was clumsy but endearing, so I tried not to take it too seriously, but I was half-hoping we’d be eating in one of those provincially-themed banquet rooms in the Great Hall of the People. That was near his home, wasn’t it? And I had gone to the Great Hall to eat with him once before but got turned away for security reasons. Maybe this time he filed a request for clearance in advance.
By the time I hopped on my bike and headed towards Zhongnanhai, I was beset by hunger, curiosity and consternation.
What was I getting myself into?
He had instructed me to wait by the Xihuamen entrance to the Forbidden City, an easy enough location to pinpoint since it was the key western gate to the vermilion-walled palace, wedged in between mighty crenelated keeps and a palace moat. And as I well knew from riding my bike in the area, it was unexpectedly serene public promenade, mercifully free of vehicular traffic.
Why such a magnificent location should be so neglected by tourists and locals alike, I couldn’t say for sure, but it was just the kind of rendezvous place that I liked. And it struck me that it served his purposes well, for it was close to the center of things but out of the limelight.
I got to the old gate early, parked my bike next to a bench overlooking the moat and loosened my shirt to let the sweat dry off. The sun was gone but the sky still glowed brightly. Dwarfed by the monolithic crenelated walls, a scattering of people could be seen in the shadows. There were couples strolling, some hand in hand, and the usual old men fishing. There were a few harried-looking tourist stragglers limping with exhaustion after exiting the Forbidden City which had just closed for the day.
When Mao’s liberation army took over Beijing and tried to make a communist capital of it, the carefully laid-out architectural form and fengshui of the old imperial citadel was abruptly divorced from function. Walls became roads and gates became towers and bastions were cut down to ditches. Moats were filled in and sluice works abandoned. But they kept the old Forbidden City intact and they created a new Forbidden City in the adjacent gardens of Zhongnanhai.
I got up from the bench to stretch, admiring the stoic fishermen who could run idle lines contentedly for so long with so little return. I walked along the edge of the moat in the tranquil twilight talking quietly to myself as I improvised a simple vocabulary lesson for navigating a diplomatic banquet:
Have you tried the hors d'oeuvres? No, too much of a tongue twister. In China, we have soup after the meal. Do you like Maotai? Please, have some more. The fish is excellent.
With footsteps so hushed I didn’t hear his approach, my private student padded over to me in his kung fu shoes and presented himself.
“Hel-lo Sir?”
“What?” I said with a shiver, abruptly turning around. “Oh, Hey! It’s you. What’s happenin’?”
“I am fine, thank you.”
Seeing the good Communist in his baggy pants and indigo jacket, all nervous and earnest, I couldn’t help but smile. Our rapport was fragile but the student-teacher dynamic was still intact.
“How do you do?”
“Oh, come on, now,” I said. “No need to be so formal. Just say hi.”
“Hi. How do you do?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” I answered with a sigh of resignation. “And you?”
“Pardon me?”
“Nice to see you.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“You are fine?”
“Fine, fine. Thank you.”
He cleared his throat authoritatively, putting the fledgling exchange of niceties out of its misery.
“Fal-low me,” he commanded in a soft, practiced voice.
I followed him.
Funny guy. He could use a word like “regional comestibles” over the phone, antiquated dictionary in hand no doubt, but he couldn’t handle basic greetings without getting everything backwards.
We walked slowly in the gathering dusk, traversing the picturesque causeway and bridge over the old moat. When we reached the sparsely lit street, we turned left. We were headed south. Thanks to Beijing’s grid-like layout, cardinal directions were easy enough to suss out, but our destination still remained a mystery.
I realized we were walking somewhere near the confusing juncture where the street changed its name from Beichang and Nanchang, if only because I had once gotten lost on this very stretch looking for the branch office of the Public Security Bureau. My visa troubles were eventually sorted out, and though I hadn’t been back in years, I knew that if we continued straight south, we’d hit the Boulevard of Eternal Happiness, which, despite its symbolic scope and grandeur, had little in the way of food or entertainment. There were no cross streets to speak of, and not a neon light in sight. Hidden behind the thicket of trees and warren of brick and stone buildings to the west lay the hidden, forbidding compound of Zhongnanhai.
My guess was that we were going to be met by a driver and be whisked off to one of those low-key elite kind of places with the kind of understated luxury that the Crimson Prince seemed to like best. I had grown accustomed to being taken out and treated, encouraged to stuff myself, eyes, ears and belly, as a hanger-on in someone else’s entourage.
What would it be this time? Smiling hostesses in Red Guard outfits, a private chef, a menu so heavy you needed two hands to hold it up?
What subtle, superlative delights awaited me?
I looked in futility for a car, his car, any car that might pass as the car that was to take us away on a journey from the ordinary to the extraordinary, but there was little traffic in these undisturbed precincts. Even the sky was obscured by the thick-leafed canopy that hung over the road.
We continued walking in an awkward silence, not quite side by side, but close enough. “Fal-low me,” he intoned again, again in the same flat voice.
We worked our way past a row of low buildings and shops, most of them shuttered. I didn’t know of any name establishments in the area, and the narrow, nondescript street was notable only because of its location. It was wedged between the old imperial palace and Zhongnanhai, which is to say between the old Forbidden City, which was open, and the new Forbidden City, which was not.
A curvilinear lakeside alternative to the dry straight lines of the fabled Forbidden City, Zhongnanhai was also an imperial compound, but built on a more human scale, more yin than yang. It was a place where emperors and emperors-to-be had once relaxed by the lake, penned poetry, met scribes and dowagers, dallied with concubines and sometimes languished under a very high-end sort of house arrest.
When the communists entered Beijing, they took over the neglected lakeside compound, put it under a comprehensive security blanket, and it came to represent their innermost sanctum of power. Mao was granted a deluxe imperial courtyard residence there, though he later traded it for a makeshift library and plain living quarters adjacent to a lakeside swimming pool.
I had grown so accustomed to being escorted into brash, grand and garish establishments with revelers lining up to get in that it came as something of a shock, if not a disappointment, when my host ushered me into a cheap looking street side eatery of the type you could pass every day without noticing. If it were not for the faint stench of spicy stewed meat, I wouldn’t have deemed it a restaurant at all. Just a single square dining room adorned with a few photos, with one big round table by the door and three smaller tables on the side.
The tables were empty, not a person in sight, but there were signs of human activity, for the floor was sticky, the table tops greasy, and the entire joint redolent of fatty meat, tobacco and fiery liquor. Not a mix of odors I liked in ensemble or in isolation, but something savory was cooking in the kitchen, so it wasn’t a total bust.
We sat down at a small side table without waiting to be seated. A waiter of sorts emerged from the kitchen where he had been too busy chatting with the cook to greet us and seat us, let alone wipe down the table, serve drinks or provide menus. When he finally shuffled over to our table, he exchanged a not overly deferential nod with my distinguished host, then pointed laconically to the menu on the wall which consisted of a few hard-to-decipher calligraphic scribbles. He pulled a dirty rag from his back pocket and gave the table a theatrical wipe before shuffling away.
“Do you like hu-man food?” asked my host, breaking a long silence.
“Human food?” I wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “Oh, I do. I really do have a strong preference for it. I simply can’t abide dog food.”
He paused, predictably confused. “Like Mao?”
Mao? I was even more confused. “Oh, you mean, like it's a dog-eat-dog world?”
Our flailing conversation was rescued by the rumpled waiter who came back to take our orders. His white shirt and black slacks were wrinkled, his hair was messy, too, but he was so laid-back it made you feel relaxed if you could contain your irritation at the slothful service.
What a nice little dive, a greasy chopsticks kind of place with old wood counters and odd interior finishings, but what was the good prince doing in a place like this? A show of proletarian solidarity? Or was he taunting me, treating a foreign nobody to a low-end meal where my jeans and sweatshirt would not be out of place?
Sticking to English had only muddled things, so I dropped the pretense of teaching him and pressed on in Chinese. Turned out the Crimson Prince meant just what he said the first time around.
Regional comestibles.
The cuisine was Hunan food. And I soon came to understand that this no-frills joint was known in this rarified quarter for its no-nonsense service, spiced up dishes and red-braised pork. The sons and daughters of the Chinese elite could get a bite to eat here without attracting a fuss. Play peasant for a bit, mix with the masses. The princelings who came here were slumming, of course, in the sense they were accustomed to meticulously-sourced food inside Zhongnanhai and fine dining in their private clubs, but the dishes here were said to be excellent even if the décor was somewhat lacking.
The Crimson Prince related to me how Mao Zedong complained about being penned up in Zhongnanhai, always surrounded by courtiers and security, so it had been arranged for him to step outside the palace and visit this very restaurant, though of course the place had been carefully swept in advance, and peopled with plainclothes police, some posing as customers, others supervising the kitchen.
“It’s like a reverse Potemkin village,” I said, reverting to English.
My host almost certainly didn’t understand the words I used, but surely he grasped the concept. Given the need for secrecy and stealth in his life as a third-generation successor to Mao, it was second nature to him that appearances should be deceiving.
Dinner was served.
The dishes were succulent, tasty and well-prepared. The gray-haired chef, momentarily freed of kitchen duty, stood by the table as we ate. He merrily claimed to have cooked for Mao, pointing to some faded photographs on the wall to prove his point. He was a bit full of himself, but a fine old soul who appeared to be on close terms with my host.
I was introduced as the English teacher of course, which was okay by me. The chef peppered our already spicy meal with some sharp-witted asides in Chinese about yin and yang and then lectured me on hot and cold humors, concluding with some dull bromides in English.
“You. Most-honored guest,” he said, looking at me.
“The food is excellent.”
“America beau-ti-ful country.”
“Well, thank you.”
The conversation quickly reverted to Chinese. Things warmed up and I kicked back and listened with interest to the princeling and the chef exchange tidbits of folklore and tales of famous banquets.
While they were talking, a party of five came in, three youngish men in fashionable jackets, two stylish women with their hair up. They were brash, loud and entitled. They obviously knew the place, but looked out of place, dressed to impress, not unlike the ostentatious partygoers I had seen at Under the Sky and other fancy clubs. They started shouting out their orders even before the chef got his apron back on.
They didn’t like slumming it, not in the way my host did, and at one point, I almost thought they were going to get up and walk out. Their sports utility vehicle was parked right outside the door, engine still running.
The Crimson Prince kept his head low, not so much to hide his countenance as to indicate a lack of interest in the other table. I got the feeling he didn’t like them, but I couldn’t say quite why. Possibly they too were princelings, but princelings of a different stripe. Then again, they might even have been high society acquaintances of his unfaithful wife, which would account for his almost visceral discomfort and sudden silence.
The cosmopolitans at the other table were dropping big English words left and right, they had the showy, tell-tale bilingualism of returned students from abroad, so the idea of recommencing a lesson in rudimentary English was too mortifying for the Crimson Prince to countenance.
We got a few sideways glances, I assumed more on account of my presence than anything else, and I thought they were an okay lot. Under more ordinary circumstances I might even have gotten talking with them, one of the gals was a real looker, and she was looking at me, but I sensed that my dinner host was ready to leave, and we did just that.
We left well sated, though not at all drunk, yet by the time we got outside, the mind of my dinner companion was so far away as to be incoherent. When we crossed the street I tried to jumpstart the conversation by reviewing a few terms of restaurant English.
“I liked the greens with garlic,” I said, enunciating each word carefully. “The pork was succulent, don’t you think?”
He didn’t respond at first, but when we reached the sidewalk, he shot out a question.
“How do you say hongshaorou?”
“Red-braised pork.”
“Bread-raised pork?”
I got so preoccupied helping him with word order and pronunciation that I hardly noticed when he paused to exchange greetings with a couple of uniformed guards standing in the shadows. As we ambled on, he dropped the pretense of this being a lesson and turned to his native tongue. He was trying to tell me something, perhaps something of pressing importance, and I could not escape the feeling he was about to ask a favor of me as well.
Dinner may have been dress-down casual, but something heavy weighed on his mind and I was getting bits and pieces of it now. In his eagerness to unload, he harped on about this and that, all of it incoming in Chinese a bit too fast, a bit too softly for me to fully grasp. Something about someone doing something, something hard to understand, something significant and not without some consequences.
I was so intent on meeting him halfway, reaching out to decipher his rapidly delivered phrases that I didn’t really notice where we were going as we ambled down a quiet alley that was graced by evenly spaced trees on both sides which flanked a row of low, windowless buildings.
Up ahead, there was a small ceremonial gate of some kind, but we turned away before confronting it, instead passing through a small passageway on the side. There were eyes on us, the kind of alert eyes I had come to recognize among the gatekeepers of the realm but crossing the line with the Crimson Prince was like crossing the line with Big Ten, you didn’t have to worry too much about how you were dressed or who thought what if you stayed close in his wake.
We passed through another plain-looking gate and then filed past a large building on a narrow esplanade until we came to the edge of a body of water glittering in the moonlight.
“I want to go to America someday,” the princeling announced in English.
“Really?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Cool. Well, we’ve got our share of regional comestibles, I suppose you could say, but nothing compared to China, of course.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Where in America would you like to go?”
“I want to go to you-sheng-mei-di.”
“Oh really?” I nodded, trying to keep the conversation rolling, but I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
The word he uttered, if I got the tones right, sounded like ‘superlative-victory-beautiful-land.’ What could that possibly be in reference to?
“Um, I was wondering, like, why do you wanna, why do you want to go, um, there?” I asked, fishing for more information.
“Half-dome.”
“Half-dome? Wait, you mean, like what’s-the-name of that, um that park, ah, Yosemite?”
“Yes, yes. You-sheng-mei-di.”
It somehow moved me that he should want to cross the ocean to see a magnificent rock in my homeland.
Diverted by visions of the American West, I had kind of lost my sense of direction by then. My first impression was that we had somehow doubled back to the Forbidden City and were now looking at a section of the palace moat, a stretch of glittering water unfamiliar to me.
“Wow. Nice view.”
“Does she talk to you?”
“You mean, ah, her?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, she’s a fine woman. I’ve known her since college.”
“I know.”
Maybe he did know about us after all.
“We were just students,” I said, hoping to put things in context, but he was on another train of thought.
“She is not happy.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I don’t know if, ah, hey, wait. Where are we?”
“Zhongnanhai.”
“What? You can just walk in here just like that?
“If you live here.”
“Oh. So this is where you and, ah, Huamei live?”
He winced at my mention of her name but quickly regained his composure.
“Other side,” he said, pointing to a cluster of residential buildings on the far shore.
“Wow. Interesting. Nice view.”
The surprise back door entry to the innermost sanctum of China’s elite had so taken me by surprise I was speaking English again.
“The lake is beautiful in the moonlight.”
The setting really was eerily magnificent, even in the shadows. The moon was broken and hanging low in the sky, but bright enough to reflect off the wind-ruffled surface of the water, while a faint incandescent glow emanated from the curtained windows of the luxe apartment buildings on the opposite shore. But Huamei’s husband didn’t take me here for moon-watching or architectural appreciation.
He was mildly vexed, and vacillating, quietly tied up in knots. He wanted to, and didn’t want to, talk to me about the wife he couldn’t get around to mention by name. I got the impression it was important to him to be in the company of someone who was a friend of the woman in question, but he probably wouldn’t have been comfortable approaching any of her girlfriends at a time like this. I was kind of amazed he chose me, of all people, to hear him out, but perhaps he thought I could offer some insight, if only by osmosis. Then again, maybe it was more transactional.
Maybe he wanted me to act as a messenger.
But talking about Huamei with her husband put me in a bind. I didn’t want to betray her trust, nor did I want to vouch for or validate her relationship with Big Ten. I was disenchanted enough by her heedless passion that I was in no mood to defend her, either.
More to the point, did he know she was pregnant?
He asked if I had seen her recently and I answered quickly, and with a modicum of sincerity, that I hadn’t, but of course, the term “recently” was open to interpretation.
I was half-tempted to tell him the truth as I understood it, that she loved different people in different ways, but I held my tongue. I couldn’t conceive of him not knowing the basic facts about her outside dalliance already, but I was pretty sure he didn’t know she was pregnant because that’s when she disappeared. It seemed more prudent to keep it abstract, to talk about the boy-girl game in general terms, to share with him my true conviction that true love could be truly irrational.
The glib English teacher in me was suddenly tongue-tied. It’s far easier to dish out grammar and verse than exchange confidences. I refused to go into detail, for fear of hurting his feelings, her feelings and my own self-esteem as well. So long as I kept it in English, I could steer our talk in such a way that we could have a pleasant conversation without significant communication, and at a time like this, saying as little as possible was fine by me.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll work out.”
“Work out?”
“You know. Things.”
“It is difficult,” he said with downcast eyes.
Seeing his discomfort, I pushed the conversation in a more impersonal direction, talking about recent news items, bilateral relations and the like.
“Hey, you know that recent US-China summit, in Washington? You think it made much of a difference?”
Brow furrowed with incomprehension; he gave me a rote answer.
“The general-secretary’s visit was deemed a success,” he responded drily.
Now we were both rudderless on autopilot.
“Well, I guess you could say that. He handled the student protest at that speech he gave on campus pretty well.”
“What protest?”
“Oh, right, I guess that wasn’t in the news here.”
A pair of strolling security guards, quietly engrossed in conversation, went silent at the sight of me as they walked past. They exchanged puzzled glances but then resumed talking to one another.
The Crimson Prince turned away from the lake and started to nudge me slowly back the way we came.
“She gives me no telephone call.”
“She doesn’t? Since when?”
He then explained in very plain and easy-to-understand Chinese that his people had seen her with another man.
“Are you sure?”
I shouldn’t have feigned ignorance. After all, the intelligence was not wrong, and what’s more, he probably knew that I knew.
“Yes, I am sure.”
“Oh dear. That sounds like ah, like a situation.”
His mouth quivered, as if ready to say something, but instead he pursed his lips and shut his eyes as if in pain.
He knew I knew. Now I was sure of it.
“Why, why, why, why?” He stopped in his tracks and held his palms facing upward. His meagre English vocabulary suddenly taking a forlorn Shakespearian turn.
“I don’t know, I really don’t,” I responded with an honest sigh.
At an instant like this, it was easy to forget that he was a prince, and this was his palace. Indeed, it was hard to see him as anything more than a hurt human being seized with self-doubt, standing on an unremarkable bit of pavement in the dark.
“You know what?” I continued.“I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but the truth is, maybe even she doesn’t know. These things, um, they happen. Happen all the time. To all kinds of people. Up and down, high and low.”
He shook his head back and forth in disbelief but said nothing.
“Yeah, I mean, it must hurt, it does hurt. I know. But I don’t know what to say.”
“But why?”
“The ways of the heart are a mystery,” I said, full of uncertainty myself. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
A bristling silence followed. We stared not at the glistening lake, the incandescent clouds or the cold effulgent moon, but at the ground, as if we were both afraid to take too hard a look at an unfeeling cosmos.
He was wearing black cloth shoes; I was wearing worn sneakers. He was upset, not inconsolable, perhaps, but weighed down and confused.
He cleared his throat. “Shall I call a car?”
“No, that’s okay. I came by bike.”
“Where is your bike?”
“By the gate. Xihuamen.”
He offered to put his driver at my disposal, saying the bike could be placed in the trunk of the car, but I insisted that I was fine peddling home under my own power which he answered by insisting that he walk me to my bike.
We exited through the small back gate using the same narrow passageway we had ambled in by. Again, I caught the watchful eye of people observing us along the way. Neither of us said a word until we were outside the maze and we had crossed the street.
Nothing more was said of Huamei.
We crossed the palace moat on a broad stone causeway and strolled along the narrow strip of public space adjacent to the imposing walls of the Forbidden City. We talked using easy words, talking about little things, talking about nothing at all.
When we said goodbye, and we did so several times, it was more than something out of phrase book. I felt a little sad watching him watch me wheel away.
And that was the last time I saw him.