We are told to have a good time and then we leave. She watches the floor, and then the numbers in the elevator. I resist the impulse to say, “Nice weather.”
We walk towards the subway and suddenly she says in English, “I want to tell you I’m very sorry about this.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I say brightly.
She glances up at me, that same sidelong glance she gives her mother. “I know you didn’t plan to spend your Saturday night dragging me to the kite races. I know you are doing this because of my dad. You probably have a girlfriend.” The last with such bitterness I am taken aback, even as I find myself thinking her English is good.
“No,” I answer honestly, “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Look, we’ll go to the kite races for awhile, then I’ll take a cab home and you can do whatever you want to do.”
The world is unnaturally cruel to ugly girls. “Why don’t we just go to the kite races and not worry about it,” I say. “Have you ever been?”
“No, I’ve only seen them on the vid.”
“Well, they’re better when you’re there.”
I pay her way into the subway and we head for Manhattan and get off at Union Square. We don’t talk on the subway but then the subway is loud. At Union Square we head for the Huang Tunnel pedestrian walkway and come up in Washington Square Park, where the race begins and ends. Washington Square is packed on Saturday night. I buy us a ticket for the stands because I’d much prefer to jack in. “Would you like something to drink? A beer?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Don’t be polite,” I say, smiling, “I’m a New Yorker. I’m going to have a beer. Did you eat dinner?” She lets me buy her a beer and I get a bag of finger dumplings and find our seats. I even buy two programs, although usually I just use the board.
We sit down, she holding her beer carefully. I watch for awhile but she doesn’t drink. Maybe she doesn’t like beer.
“How old were you when you came to New York?” I ask.
“Nine,” she says.
“Do you like it?”
“I hated it at first, but I guess it’s all right.” She shrugs. “Places are pretty much the same, underneath.”
“Do you think?” I ask. “I’ve never been anywhere but New York, except once when I was six and we went to San Diego to see my grandparents. It seemed different.”
“Things are different from place to place,” she says. “New York is really very different from China, not as—” She pauses, diplomatically searching for the word.
“We’re backward,” I supply, grinning.
“Not backward,” she says. “Things are less advanced, maybe. I used to think I was unhappy because my father was in trouble and we had to come here, but now I don’t think it makes any difference. If you’re a certain kind of person, you’ll be unhappy wherever you are.”
I have no doubt she considers herself that certain kind of person.
“Are you happy?” she asks.
“Do you mean at this moment, or with my life?”
“With your life. Answer the first thing you think.”
“No,” I say.
“Do you think you would be happy in China?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I’ve never been to China.”
“Do you want to go?”
I wonder if she is playing a game. Does she know that her father has dangled China in front of me as her dowry? “Sure,” I make it sound as nonchalant as I can, “I wouldn’t mind going to China. I’d like to see China.”
“Would you like to live there?”
“Go to school there? Live there forever?” In China deviance is a capital offence, I don’t know about living in a country where my natural tendencies could see me end up with the traditional remedy of a bullet in the back of the head.
“It doesn’t make any difference if you did or you didn’t,” she says, “because you would still be you. And if you were unhappy here, you’d be unhappy there.”
“But much of our unhappiness is caused by social conditions,” I say.
“That’s naive socialism,” with some disgust.
Actually it’s evasive on my part. What started us on this conversation? Perhaps my expression gives away my unease.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was just trying to explain.”
She is fascinating to look at. Her teeth are straight, her hair nice, her clothes lovely. But she has no delicacy of feature. Her nose is too broad, her lips are narrow, her forehead too low. And she has no chin. It is an amazingly simian face. I find myself drawn back again and again to studying her. Where did that face come from? Foreman Qian is not handsome, but his face is rounder. And her mother, Liu Su-ping, is no beauty, but she doesn’t seem to possess any of the features I find in her daughter’s face.
“Why do you keep looking at me?” San-xiang says suddenly.
Caught out, I look away. “I am out with you,” I say. “If you don’t like beer, I’ll drink yours. Would you like a soda?”
“I like beer,” she says, and sips hers.
She doesn’t like beer. I make some sort of small talk about kite racers, and every time I glance at her she sips her beer. Lipstick bleeds at the lip of the cup. The fliers spiral lazily up, bright silks in red and blue. I show her how to place a bet, jack her into the system. “You have to bet on someone to be jacked in with them,” I explain. “But once you’ve jacked in, you can bet any additional way you want. Even against your flier if you want. I usually jack into rookies because they’re less accustomed to racing and it’s more exciting.”
She bites her lower lip in concentration. Above us the kites swing in a huge arc over the square and head into the darkness towards Union Square. The system cuts in and suddenly I’m in synch with a rookie flier named Iceberg. I can feel his/my muscles pumping, I can see the kites ahead of me when we come into the lights over Union Square. The kites swing over Union Square and
come back towards Washington Square, gearing up to begin the race when they cross Washington Square. My flier is tense with anticipation. It’s not the same as really experiencing it yourself, everything is flattened, at a distance. I know he feels the cold, but I’m not cold. I open my eyes and see the silks above us.
I glance at San-xiang. She is gazing up into the darkness and when the kites flash brilliant into the lights above Washington Square she shivers and takes a drink of her beer.
I don’t know why it is so much more exciting to see the race live. Everybody jacks in at home, too. And at home the race is clearer than it is out here. But it is wonderful to see them up there and at the same time be able to close your eyes and see some sense of what they see.
The race is quick—at two laps they always are—and Iceberg doesn’t finish in the money. “Ready for another beer?” I ask San-xiang.
“Yes, please,” she says. She has color in her cheeks, whether from the race, the chill, or the beer, I can’t tell.
When I come back she smiles up at me. “Thank you,” she accepts the beer. “This is fun. You do this a lot?”
“Pretty much,” I say.
“Would you like to be a kite racer?”
“I’m too big,” I say, laughing. Kite racers are small, usually around forty, forty-five kilos.
“Yes, but wouldn’t you like to be? If you could?”
“If I won a lot,” I say.
She laughs and sips her beer, watching me over the rim of the glass. Flirting. We pour over the program, I haven’t heard of any of the fliers in this race but I recognize a lot of the racers in the last three races, the big ones. San-xiang decides not to bet on a rookie, she wants to win.
She doesn’t win the second race, nor the third, but her flier comes in second for the fourth race and pays 3:1. The credit light flashes and I take her up to pick up her chit. When she stands
up she is a little unsteady on her feet from the beer. She refuses my arm but she’s delighted when they pay her off. She turns that monkey-face up at me and smiles.
“I’m having a wonderful time,” she says, “one of the best times in my life!”
We walk a bit rather than go back to our seats and the chill clears her head.
“We won’t miss the next race, will we?” she asks.
I shake my head. “There’s a break between the first four races and the last four. The first four are the minor card and the last four are the major card. The best fliers race the major card.”
Peter and a guy from Bed-Stuy are standing where we always stand by the Arch. I hadn’t intended to walk that way, just habit. I think about pretending not to see them but decide what the hell and wave. Peter grins and waves back.
“Who’s that?” San-xiang whispers.
“A good friend of mine,” I say.
We stop for a moment and talk to Peter and Bed-Stuy, whose name I can’t at this moment remember. “Peter, this is Qian San-xiang. My friend Peter and”—I make those motions one makes when one can’t remember a name.
“Kai,” Bed-Stuy says.
“Is that an American name?” San-xiang asks.
“Scandinavian,” Bed-Stuy says, “but I’m American.” Peter and Bed-Stuy are both fair, both anglo-handsome. Neither one of them is very attractive by Chinese standards—big-nosed for one thing and Kai in particular has the kind of angled face that Chinese don’t like. Chinese always think westerners’ eyes are set too deep in their heads, that they look a bit Neanderthal. This is not a prejudice I share. But Peter and Kai are dressed well, both in sweaters with leather ties and shimmering reflective strips dangling off the shoulders and shaded glasses sitting on top of their hair. Bed-Stuy has his hair in a tail, like me. They look so bent I wonder if she will guess.
We are carefully low key, talk a little about who is expected to win the seventh and eighth races, and then I say that San-xiang and I have to get back to our seats.
“We’re going out to Commemorative afterwards,” Peter says. “Drop by if it’s not too late.”
“Okay,” I say and head us back to the stands.
“What is Commemorative?” San-xiang asks.
“It’s a flier bar that Peter likes,” I say. “Do you want another beer?”
I buy two more beers and we make our way back to our seats. We pour over the program and talk about who to bet on. I’m tired and want to go home, but San-xiang is clearly enjoying the evening so I feign interest. She sips her beer and looks coyly at me out of the corners of her eyes and not knowing how to respond I pretend not to notice. Clearly she does not think I am gay and that is a relief but the night is beginning to depress me.
“Your friends are handsome,” she says.
“Do you think so?” I ask.
“You da bizi,”
I say. They have big noses. The Chinese slang for westerner is “big nose.”
She giggles and looks down at the program.
Finally the last four races start. It’s a so-so card, the seventh race looks good. I pick a flier at random in the fifth race, San-xiang deliberates before picking the odds-on favorite. I find myself watching for Peter and Bed-Stuy between races. San-xiang is disappointed when her flier doesn’t come in. She wins the sixth race and is so excited she spills her beer. With some trepidation I buy her another, she has had two and a half and it is obvious that she’s not accustomed to them. But I am hoping that if she has another she will be drunk and sleepy enough to want to go home after the races.
I finally pick a flier who places in the eighth race. San-xiang is giggly and unsteady.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“What about that place your friends are going, Commemorative, do they have food?”
“Not this late,” I say. “I know a little Thai place on West 4th Street, it’s not far from here.”
“I am having such a good time, I want to stay out all night!” she says. “Are you having a good time?”
“Of course,” I say. “When you go with someone who’s never seen the kite races it reminds you of your first time.”
“It’s so exciting. It’s so much better than watching it on the vid.”
This is a night she will remember all her life, the night when she went to the kite races. How many nights do I remember? How many special nights have I had in my life? Is it so much to give up a night?
“Let’s get something to eat and then see how late it is, maybe stop in for a drink,” I say. She smiles up at me. Oh, the dangers of pity.
The restaurant is crowded and we pick up our orders of curry and noodles and eat standing on the street. The streets are full of students in outrageous clothes. San-xiang watches a girl in a lavender tunic with no sides, belted in the middle. Underneath she wears a pale green transparent body suit. She is arguing with a boy, shaking her copper hair to make her points. The boy—as drab as she is vivid—is in one of those gray diaper things like they wear in India. He has long, impossibly skinny black-clad legs sticking out of his dhoti. I wonder what he would look like if he didn’t rat his hair. “Leave her,” I urge him silently. He is angry and sullen, regarding her out of hot bruised eyes. He crosses his arms and shifts his weight from one leg to the other. He is so thin that there is nothing under his skin but long, striated muscle, and the muscles are clear as diagrams over his face bones. Suddenly he turns and walks off.