I Stand Corrected Page 13

  As treacherous as it can be for the guest, partaking in the inebriated merriment at a Chinese table is a sign of goodwill; denying that pleasure to the host brings a possible loss of face. At banquets, it is not uncommon for the more savvy Western businessmen, aware of their own limitations, to be accompanied by a drinking stand-in. On one’s own, it is best to employ false excuses based on health issues, for if you do not make a plausible excuse known before the first toast, you’re in it for the long haul.

  What fails to happen can matter as much as what happens, and declining anything from one’s host in China—even with a seemingly legitimate excuse—throws a gloom over the shared celebration. As a guest of Mr. Han that evening, I moved out of my comfort zone to keep him happy. It takes only a few sips of alcohol to make the familiar seem strange to me, and the strange familiar. I began the evening with a straight-backed propriety, but sipping my way through the meal reduced me to a disheveled heap. When Mr. Han raised his glass to offer our final toast with the noxious baijiu, I slumped forward onto a plate in front of me of slices of dragon fruit and pineapple. Gilliam helped return me to an upright position for the sake of the toast. Black seeds from the dragon fruit stuck to my face.

  Though my son was endlessly amused, having never seen me in such an undignified state, I was the only one at the table appalled by my condition. Rather than a sign of degradation, my inebriation was viewed as a welcomed show to Mr. Han that the elaborate dinner he hosted had been a great success. Staggering out of the restaurant—with no wish that anyone, including Gilliam, accompany me in my semiconscious haze—I insisted I could make it back to the hotel on my own.

  Mercifully, the cool night air restored a degree of sobriety, and I reclaimed enough cognitive thought to decide to include a lesson on wine protocol in my book.

  A splitting headache was waiting for me the next morning, but I managed to write the lesson on the practices of Western drinking. Its introductory sentence was banging against my brain as I wrote it.

  → LESSON 16

  Most important, make sure you know your own limits in drinking alcohol. At the dining table, the bottle of wine should be placed in front of the host. If there are more than six guests, another bottle of wine should be stationed at the other end of the table.

  If you are the host, it is nice—but not necessary—to offer your guests their choice of red or white, no matter what kind of meal you are serving. Wineglasses should be filled, from the right, half to two-thirds full. When pouring and refilling, it is best to hold the bottle around the label to prevent slippage and to twist the bottle slightly, which will disallow drops from falling from the neck of the bottle onto the tablecloth. If you are the guest, don’t reach across the table for the wine. Wait for it to be offered. It is the prerogative of the host to offer the first toast. If it is apparent a toast is not forthcoming, a guest can propose the first toast (before people start eating) as a way of thanking the host for bringing everyone together and the hostess for her generous hospitality.

  After I had composed this lesson on wine protocol, it occurred to me that there was another, separate issue that required equal consideration. Though unable to recall a great deal of the previous evening, I had a vivid recollection of the various noises made at the table, which convinced me to amend the lesson I had already written on table manners. Advice on the inadvisability of making noises—at and away from the dining table—required face-saving aplomb. I was able to provide some degree of it by drawing from my family experiences.

  When W. and I were wed on the Amazon River by the captain of a Peruvian supply boat, the ceremony was followed by a feast of monkey meat. It was little wonder the legality of our marriage certificate didn’t manage to make it across the border and we had no choice but to repeat the wedding in the States.

  The week before, a distraught W. made a call to my office to inform me that he wanted to tell me something. He suggested discussing it over dinner that night.

  I phoned Candida immediately. “What can it possibly be?” I asked her.

  “He’s already married,” guessed Candida.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He couldn’t have hidden a wife—not for a year.”

  As the words crossed my lips, I remembered W.’s admiration of the man in the Amazon with two wives. When, that night, I met W. at the restaurant, the knot in my stomach had taken the place of an appetite.

  W. and I sat facing each other across a table, and hovering directly above was a forbiddingly empty caption balloon. W. ate his dinner; I rearranged mine on my plate. W. lingered over dessert; I sipped tea. By the time W.’s espresso arrived, I couldn’t stand waiting any longer.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” I asked with an expression that projected mortification in advance.

  “This is so embarrassing,” was his ominous preamble. “If I tell you, you won’t bolt, will you?”

  Solidified fear lodged in my throat. “Of course not,” I managed to say. It wasn’t an entirely truthful answer.

  “The thing is,” he said in a voice that rose barely above a whisper, “I make a sound.”

  I was sure I’d misheard.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I make a sound,” he repeated.

  By no means did my confusion disappear, but overwhelming gratitude took over.

  W. was relieved as well. “I feel better now that you know,” he said.

  “I’m glad you told me, darling, but we’ve been together for almost a year, and I think I’ve heard all the sounds in your repertoire.”

  “Not this one. I make it when I draw. You’re not around when I draw.”

  As a cartoonist, W. worked from home. What he had said was true: I left for my office in the early morning, before he sat down to draw, and I didn’t return home until after he had put his drawings away for the evening. W. explained that he suppressed the noise during the weekends.

  “What kind of noise is it?” I asked him.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “But I gather it’s loud.… I mean I’ve been told it’s loud.”

  “How loud?”

  “The couple who lives below us thinks I’ve set up a machine shop,” said the man for whom I would forsake all others.

  The noise made a point of introducing itself the day we would be joined in legal matrimony. The wedding was held on W.’s family ranch in Northern California. That morning—as I walked across the courtyard toward the cottage where W. was drawing—I heard what I assumed was the sound of farm equipment, but each step brought me closer to the realization that W. was powering the noise.

  I stood outside the door long enough to decide not to open it. Instead, I went to the main house to have breakfast with my future mother-in-law. “How long has he made the noise?” I asked. “Since he was a little boy,” she explained, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “But I think it’s better if you referred to it as a ‘sound,’ ” she suggested. “It’s a far more attractive word than ‘noise,’ wouldn’t you agree?”

  The Collinsworths were arriving later that morning. Each member of my family would display a uniquely disturbing brand of eccentricity; one in particular had required a three-day pass from a mental institution to make the trip. It seemed to me that I was in no position to ask questions I wasn’t willing to answer myself.

  “Of course, you’re right,” I told the woman W. loved best. “It’s a sound, not a noise.”

  Despite my mother-in-law’s distinction between making a noise and making a sound, it is equally likely that both—heard by those other than the Chinese—will result in varying degrees of embarrassment for Westerners. This I made clear in my amendment to the lesson on table manners.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I couldn’t bring myself to visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which exhibits skeletons stacked in piles and old photographs of corpses lining the streets. Affirmation of life for me was to be found in a Muslim-style tomb containing the headgear of a fourtee
nth-century eunuch, buried at sea, whose expeditionary journeys from Nanjing reached as far as Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and East Africa.

  Zheng He had been a mariner, an explorer, a diplomat, and the fleet commander of naval expeditions during the Ming dynasty. Years before my visit to Nanjing, I heard some part of his incredible story from a Chinese colleague in Shanghai. For fear of putting my colleague on the spot, I withheld questions, the first of which would have been the most obvious: Given Zheng He’s dashing flair and unquestioned bravery, who would have deliberately truncated the physical evidence of his manhood—and why?

  Answers were found in Nanjing.

  Zheng He was captured as a child by the Ming army in Yunnan Province. He was castrated and placed in servitude to the emperor, whose son, Zhu Di, was Zheng’s age. As a young man, Zheng accompanied Zhu Di on military campaigns against hostile Mongol tribes on the northern frontier, and thereby earned both Zhu Di’s trust and respect.

  With time, Zhu Di’s armies would also occupy Nanjing. When Zhu Di became emperor, he ordered his court in Nanjing to construct a vast armada of nearly two thousand trading vessels and warships and named Zheng He its commander in chief.

  Zheng He returned from travels to Brunei, Thailand, India, the Horn of Africa, and Arabia with the exotic novelties of ostriches, zebras, and giraffes; and his fabled exploits were recorded by Western writers, who changed his name to Sinbad the Sailor.

  After exhausting my way around all that had been memorialized of Zheng He in Nanjing, I did what I do in a city I do not know: I headed for the market. Regardless of where in the world they happen to be, open-air markets are always a lively congregation of everything local; the one in Nanjing was no exception.

  I am not as tall as my son, but my height is still considered extreme in most parts of China, and people stare at me as though studying a creature capable of feeding from the topmost leaves on trees. I wandered the market in no particular direction but word traveled quickly—or so it seemed—for it was not too long before locals congregated in a semicircle, nodding among themselves as if agreeing on my oddity. After a short period of intense staring, some asked to take my picture, while others encouraged me in the direction of various food stalls. Trying my best to be agreeable, but unwilling to purchase skewers of squid and octopus, I sought safety in the market’s grain stalls.

  Grain has remained a dietary mainstay in China since Mao declared it so with the Great Leap Forward, a hideously misnamed campaign wherein thirty million people starved to death in an eight-year period. That human disaster was the result of the failed attempt at a nationwide communal agricultural production dictated by Mao’s blind insistence that crop output would soar by appropriating private land for the purpose of forming farming communes, much like the one to which Mr. Han’s parents were inducted.

  Convinced that large reserves of grain would be the nation’s security, Mao turned as much of the land as possible over to rice, wheat, and millet. Wild birds, considered poachers of grain, were ordered killed, and to make room for more cropland, hillsides were deforested, fruit trees were cut down, and ponds were filled in. Destruction of grasslands caused the soil erosion that is one of the many reasons for China’s current urban pollution.

  Mao’s manic belief in grain was matched only by his obsession with the pig, an animal that nourishes itself with what it can scavenge and produces a nonstop supply of fertilizer for the crops. So prevalent is pork in China that the Chinese use their word for meat, rou, to mean pork unless otherwise specified.

  The Chinese believe that eating specific animal parts contributes to human health. They are convinced, for example, that consuming fish eyes maintains ocular health. More ethereal properties are attributed to certain animals and are ascribed literal representations.

  For the Chinese, the turtle is a symbol of wisdom, endurance, and long life, and it is thought that by eating turtles, one is granted those same benefits. It came as no surprise to me that turtles were sold in the Nanjing market. Indeed, I have seen turtles sold in Chinatown markets throughout the world.

  It is possible that turtles, with a lineage extending back at least 230 million years, preceded dinosaurs. Their physical appearance has changed remarkably little since the original model. Because their hearts don’t require a regular beat—and can be turned off and on at will—turtles have managed the enviable feat of slowing the aging process. I was especially pleased to learn that female turtles don’t reach sexual maturity until their forties or fifties. Since turtles’ shells are, in effect, the bones of the rib cage turned inside out, turtles cannot crawl out of them. They are deliberate-moving and very friendly looking creatures that can grow quite large—large enough to take up the entire width of a bathtub. I know this for a fact.

  “HE’S IN THE BATHTUB,” was six-year-old Gilliam’s greeting when I returned home from the office one night.

  At the time, we were living in L.A., and there were only two “he’s” under our roof. One was standing in front of me, and the other took showers.

  Aware of my husband’s improvisational approach to parenthood and reminding myself that they had been left to their own devices the entire day—a school holiday—I realized as Gilliam took my hand to lead me to the bathroom that anything was possible.

  Sitting in enough water to be reassured he was not entirely out of his element was a turtle so large that, had it not been alive in our bathroom, it could have been on taxidermic display at any number of natural history museums.

  He stretched his stringy neck to its longest possible reach and moved his wizened face slowly from side to side. With his unblinking, upwardly tilted gaze, he must have seen that I was even more confused than he was. The only question that came from my open mouth would repeat itself throughout my son’s early childhood:

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Papa has gone to the store for dinner,” said Gilliam. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

  “Yes … and what a surprise he is,” was all I had a chance to say before I heard the garage door open and W. come in through the kitchen.

  “Welcome home, my dear. I assume you’ve been introduced to the new member of our household.”

  “We’ve met.…”

  “He’s a beauty, isn’t he?”

  “Where in God’s name did he come from?”

  “He was meant to be lunch. Luckily for him, I happened to ask if the turtle soup was fresh,” said W., uncorking a bottle of wine.

  From this information, I assumed they had gone to L.A.’s Chinatown.

  “Wonderful little restaurant,” reported W. “No menu … two or three selections,… and when I asked about the turtle soup, the owner suggested that we see for ourselves. Gilly took one look at the turtles stacked in a wooden barrel and insisted we save one of them.”

  Elvira, the young nanny who lived with us during the week, listened politely to that evening’s one-topic conversation. Refraining from expressing her opinion, she sat in quiet dignity, no doubt asking herself whether our benign eccentricities had taken a dangerous turn.

  “He’ll be a great addition to the koi pond,” suggested W., referring to ours in the gardened courtyard behind the house.

  “What will we feed him?” I asked.

  “From the look of him, I’d say anything that happens to cross his path,” said W, prompting me to inquire if anyone had seen our cat recently.

  “Strawberries,” suggested Gilliam. “He’ll eat strawberries.”

  “It’s not likely the turtle would enjoy strawberries, sweetheart,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” Gilliam insisted. “Remember the one in the book? He loved strawberries.”

  “I don’t remember that book,” I had to admit.

  It was only when Gilliam began to describe the story’s characters that I realized he was referring to Gerald Durrell’s account of his childhood in Corfu.

  “Honey, that was a fairly small tortoise. This is a turtle—one that’s apparently been on
a regime of steroids.”

  “We need to start somewhere,” Gilliam said.

  “The boy has a point,” suggested W.

  “You do realize how odd all of this is, don’t you?” I asked my husband.

  “I think it’s perfectly reasonable,” insisted W.

  I was sure reason would have disagreed, but I got into the car after dinner and drove to a grocery in Beverly Hills that stayed open late so that I could buy strawberries for a shockingly large turtle rescued by my son that afternoon from becoming soup stock in L.A.’s Chinatown.

  There are few universal truths to which I can personally attest: one is that turtles go wild for strawberries. Certainly the turtle in our bathtub did that night, as did each of the ten turtles rescued from Chinatowns in the various other cities in which we lived during that period. A single lucky turtle was bought each year and released into whatever nature could be found in the city we happened to be living in that particular year. It was an annual rite known as the Turtle Release.

  THERE WAS NO window of opportunity for the Turtle Release in Nanjing. Gilliam was with his friends for the day, and we were returning to Beijing that night. Making our departure fraught was a problem checking out of the hotel.

  I had taken advantage of the modern convenience of the hotel safe and had stored my passport there. When the time came to retrieve it, the safe would not open. It required two hours and a crew of five to blast through the adjoining wall and into the safe. The deafening explosion left our ears ringing. My passport was returned to me still smoldering from gunpowder burns.

  PART EIGHT

  Getting from One Place to the Other

  If you want to know about the road ahead, ask someone who has come back.

  —Chinese proverb

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO