The Other Side of the World (14 page)

“What about my toothbrush?” I asked.

 

In the middle of the night—two-twenty-one on the bedside clock—the door opened and two women entered the room, one of them carrying a small satchel. The woman I was with—her name was Bao-zhu, which she'd told me meant treasure-jewel—put a finger against my lips to indicate that I shouldn't be alarmed.

The two women, dressed as Bao-zhu had been in the uniforms of Singapore Airlines, seemed to glide toward me on cushions of air. The woman carrying the satchel set it on the floor, and spoke in a surprisingly clear and silky voice, and with an accent more American than English.

“We are here compliments of your good friend and ours,” she said. She pointed to the satchel. “I have brought your toothbrush, of course, plus several pieces of clothing and some personal items I thought you might need before you leave for work in the morning.”

“Hey thanks—but am I now expected to reciprocate—to send two women to his room?” I asked.

“If you wish,” she said, and smiled in a way that made me think she understood my attempt at irony. The second woman, who had moved to the other side of the bed, stepped out of her shoes and dress, and lay down behind Bao-zhu.

“You speak excellent English,” I said to the woman who faced me.

“My name is Jin-gen,” she said, “which means golden root, but you may call me Ginny if you prefer. I will be your translator tonight.”

The woman behind Bao-zhu, her arms around Bao-zhu's waist, tapped me on the shoulder and spoke in what I assumed was Chinese.

“She wishes to explain that although her name, Jin-
feng
, is similar to mine in its first part,” Jin-gen said, “yet due to its second part, it becomes quite different from mine. It means golden phoenix.”

“So that I'll rise again—is that the message?” I forced a laugh. “I mean, come on—what's going on here? Is this for real?”

“Oh yes—quite real, as you will see presently. And seeing is believing—is that not a common expression where you come from?”

“Seeing is believing,” I said. “Sure. But I've never done a foursome before—a quartet, right?—never even seen one.”

“Then we will have the honor of being your first.” She knelt beside the bed so that her face—an almost perfect oval that was heartstoppingly beautiful, and without any least sign of care
or tension—was level with mine. “You are very sweet, Mister Charles,” she said, “but there is no need to be nervous.”

“You can call me Charlie if you like,” I said.

Again, she smiled ever so slightly and, with her index finger, she pressed on my chest at the center of my breast bone.

“As I said, I will be your translator tonight. I am here, that is, to translate your wishes into reality. In this room, with us, whatever you desire or imagine is possible.”

“I wonder, though,” I said—a line I thought my father—or Seana!—might have found admirable—“if that's either desirable or possible.”

She answered my question by running her finger down my chest, the nail scraping my skin but not breaking it, and letting her finger come to rest just above my navel.

“Okay,” I said. “I think I see what you're getting at, but when you came in a few minutes ago, I was asleep, and at first…”

I hesitated.

“Yes?”

“What about my dreams?” I asked. “When you entered the room, I was dreaming wonderful dreams, and in the last one I was reading a book—I was a character in the book, actually—and I fell in love with a beautiful woman who confessed to having loved me forever, and we began to make love as if it were the first time for each of us.”

“And then—?”

“The famous what-happened-next—?”

“Yes. Tell me, please. What happens next?”

“Okay,” I said. “But first, I have to tell you that I'm feeling very sad. I mean, I know it's strange, given that the three of you are here, but I'm feeling sad, and I think it's because just as the woman and I were about to make love, my dream was interrupted by two women entering my room.”

“So you are upset with me for stealing your dream from you, is that it?”

Bao-zhu was licking the back of my neck while Jin-feng, who'd moved to the foot of the bed, had begun massaging my feet.

“Maybe,” I said.

“You will have more dreams,” Jin-gen said. “You have my assurances.”

 

In the morning, when the others were gone, I asked Jin-gen if she could return and spend the evening with me, and she said she could, and I also asked if I could call her JG rather than Ginny—that Ginny seemed like a name for a high school cheerleader, and I didn't want to think of her that way.

“You may call me Jin-gen,” she said.

“Why not JG?”

“Because.”

“Because why—?”

“Because it is not my name,” she said.

Before she left—I was to have an hour or so to myself until it was time to leave for work and for my appointments, she explained, so the transition from night to day would not be unnecessarily abrupt, and so the moment could be noted in a way I felt appropriate—she said she would pick me up by car in front of my office building at five-forty, and she hoped I would allow her to make reservations for dinner.

“Sure,” I said, and added: “Many things may be possible, though I get the feeling that disagreeing with you will not be one of them.”

“You are at least as clever as you are kind,” she said, inclining her head toward me in a slight bow, and leaving the room before I could ask what had made her use the word ‘kind.'

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and I thought—hoped—she might be returning, but it was a waiter bringing breakfast. After Jin-gen's arrival, I'd slept well when I'd slept—a deep post-coital sleep that was, as far as I could
remember, and despite the assurances Jin-gen had given me, dreamless. This was something that rarely happened to me, and I'd mentioned this, told Jin-gen I loved to dream—that I often wanted to go to sleep in order to dream—and that my father had sometimes reminded me of something I'd said when I was a boy: that for me going to sleep and dreaming was like going to the movies, but even better because in all the stories I got to be the hero.

And there was this too, I realized while, from the terrace, I watched small boats (called bumboats, or cigar boats, I'd learn) darting and skittering around the larger boats as they made their morning pick-ups and deliveries—that despite the bodily pleasures and intimacies I'd just experienced, I was feeling at ease in a way I'd sometimes felt, not after a night of love, but after an evening spent hanging out with good friends.

 

Jin-gen stayed with me for the next seven nights, and I counted none but happy hours during our time together, and not only because of the physical pleasures, which were exquisite beyond anything I'd ever known, but because of the way, at dinner that first night, and at breakfast the next morning—and before we made love, and after we made love, and when we'd wake in the middle of the night or toward morning—we traded stories. It felt wonderful to lie beside her and feel as if I'd been given permission to tell her
everything
, and to do so not to impress her, or to get her to please me in sublime and/or (previously) forbidden ways, or to settle scores, or to let old injuries and demons loose—or for any
reason
, really—but for the sheer joy of telling stories.

I loved listening to her, and here's some of what I learned: she'd grown up, the youngest of seven children, in the province of Hunan, about forty miles from its capital city of Changsha, where, along with her parents, brothers, and sisters, she lived and worked on a collective rice farm. Her father, Yu-lin Liu, had
himself been born in the city of Changsha, where
his
father, Yuan-sou Liu, had been a teacher and an acting school principal. Yu-lin Liu had been raised in a large house with many brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. A gifted student, he'd attended the university in Changsha for three years before being informed upon by a fellow student for a casual remark he'd made about Chairman Mao when he and the student were spending an afternoon together in a teahouse. Yu-lin Liu was convicted of ‘impure thoughts,' and sent to a stone quarry on an island in Taihu Lake, in Jiangsu province, where he served for seven years as part of a labor-reform brigade.

At the time of his sentencing, he was twenty-four years old and had been married to Jin-gen's mother, Yuan-ling, for six years. Like Yu-lin Liu, Yuan-ling came from an educated family, and she and Yu-lin Liu had had six children, two boys and four girls. By the time Yu-lin returned from the labor camp in 1984, the one-child-per-family law was in effect, and when Jin-gen was born a year later, they claimed she was the daughter of Si-hui, a childless aunt who lived with Yu-lin Liu and Yuan-ling in the commune.

As soon as Jin-gen could walk and talk, her father and mother began teaching her to read and to write. Because she was a girl, along with the risk that the truth of her birth would be uncovered (and with it, her father and grandfather's criminal records), they were certain Jin-gen would never be admitted to a university, and so, when she was fifteen, the family sent her and an older sister, Wei-li, to Guangzhou—the former Canton—in the province of Guangdong, where hundreds of clothing manufacturers had been setting up factories. The plan, one that had worked for Jin-gen's oldest sister, Yu-mei, was for her to find work there and, by the force of her beauty, intelligence, and industriousness, to attract a sponsor, either Chinese or foreign (and preferably American or Dutch), who might bring her to one of the great international cities—Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong
Kong, Jakarta, or Singapore—where she could earn more than she would on the rice farm or in a factory, and where she might eventually come to a better life.

Like her sisters before her, Jin-gen lied about her age, and arrived in Guangzhou with documents, secured from a neighbor on the commune, that validated the lies. On her third day in Guangzhou, she found work in an American factory that made children's dresses, and though the work was demanding, it was somewhat less exhausting than work in the rice fields had been. From conversations with other women she learned she'd been lucky in this first job—that they preferred working in American factories because conditions there were usually cleaner, and more humane, than they were in factories run by companies from other nations. What American firms such as Nike and Gap had discovered—this confirmed what Nick told me at our reunion—was that the better the working conditions and the happier the workers, the more efficient and productive the factories, and the more reliable its products.

Every American company, from the smallest to the largest (as was true in Singapore), had to have a local partner in order to be able to do business, and the American companies did what they could, bribes included, to keep Chinese officials from shutting them down for violations of laws regarding working conditions. Still, the local Chinese officials and inspectors were, to Jin-gen's surprise, less feared by the American businessmen than their own American inspectors, who didn't hesitate to give pink slips to anyone found violating even the most minor technicalities.

In the factory, Jin-gen and her sister started out trimming and cutting threads from hems, linings, and buttonholes. Wei-li, more adept at these tasks than Jin-gen, was soon working at a sewing machine, stitching in labels. A short while later, Jin-gen, favored by one of the local Chinese foremen, became a tea-and-water girl, walking the factory floor all day and dispensing tea and water to workers from a large two-barreled aluminum canteen
on her back. She lived with the Chinese foreman, whose status allowed him his own small room so that—a welcome perk—Jin-gen didn't have to spend her nights in the factory itself, where hundreds of families, many with infants and children, slept on the floor.

What surprised me were not Jin-gen's descriptions of how relentlessly hard, boring, and dis-spiriting the work was—how little life for workers existed beyond work itself (in Amherst, Nick had given me graphic, first-hand reports on this)—but the pride she took in the factories and their productivity. “We are machines, you see,” she kept saying (based on my experience, I'd respond, she was anything but a machine). “But we
are
machines, Charlie,” she'd insist. “We are machines and that is why we are great—China, not India!—and why the world will have to reckon with us before all others. We—the workers!—are cogs in wheels, wires in motors, fuel for electricity, chips for computers, do you see? We
are
machines! That is what we are—and that is why we are the future…”

The children's dress factory, which employed fewer than five hundred women, could, she boasted, turn out more than twelve thousand dresses in a day. And a jewelry factory where she worked after this (transferred there, the foreman took her with him), could produce ten thousand pairs of earrings by noon, and could do this from a new design given to them at the start of the workday.

There seemed no disgrace, despite her age, to being the companion of the Chinese foreman. Rather the opposite, for she had privileges that made her the envy of other women, not the least of which was her ability to send money to her family with a reasonable assurance it would get there.

Her father, I learned, was not the only member of her family to have been imprisoned. Her grandfather had spent six years in a labor camp, and on our fourth night together, while we ate in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of the city where a Chinese
man and his wife cooked for us (they lived behind a curtain that separated the kitchen and small eating area from their sleeping quarters), Jin-gen told me her grandfather's story.