The Other Side of the World (15 page)

Before his imprisonment, her grandfather had been the acting principal at a school in Changsha, and he had hoped some day to be made principal of the school, a school he himself had attended. The local Communist Party chief, however, was also determined to become principal of the school, and Jin-gen's grandfather and the party chief became fierce rivals. In 1968, two years after Mao declared a Cultural Revolution for China, her grandfather was declared a Rightist, and sentenced to six years in a coal mine being used as a forced labor camp. Early in his fourth year in the camp—during the first three he'd been forbidden to write or receive letters—he was, for having protested his treatment by a guard, placed in solitary confinement, at which time, the guard took pleasure in reminding him of what Chairman Mao had said: that a revolution was not a dinner party.

In despair, he decided to take his own life by tearing apart his shirt and trousers and braiding them into a rope he attached to an overhead beam, and he was about to hang himself when he heard a deep sigh come from an adjoining cell. He put his ear to the wall, and heard the wailing of another prisoner. He thought he recognized the voice, listened more intently and soon realized that the man in the adjoining cell was his rival, the local party chief, who was proclaiming that he too was going to kill himself.

In that moment, Jin-gen's grandfather decided to postpone his own suicide, reasoning, as he later explained to Jin-gen's father, that if the party chief killed himself, and if he survived his imprisonment, and if the political winds shifted direction, he would have lost his major rival for the position of principal.

The party chief, however, informed by a guard that they were expecting Jin-gen's grandfather to commit suicide, also decided not to kill himself so that, upon his release from the camp, he might have a clear path to becoming principal. The result was
that both men survived their incarcerations. Three years after Jin-gen was born, in 1989, her grandfather died of throat cancer. Neither he nor the party chief ever became principal of the school.

Jin-gen's father had told her the story, but had never spoken in any detail of the torture either he or her grandfather suffered. What she did tell me, however—because, she said, she wanted me to have some small sense of what these years were like for Chinese families such as hers—was that while her father was working in the stone quarry, he several times watched men place their legs on railroad tracks used to carry carloads of stone down from the high quarry to a stone-breaking area below. In this way, they hoped to lose one or both legs and, if they survived, to have the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in a home for invalids. Caution, however, was required, for if a guard saw a prisoner preparing to amputate a leg in this manner, the man would be taken away and summarily executed.

What Jin-gen found as remarkable as the events by which her grandfather and the party chief survived was that either of them had survived at all. Her own survival was less mysterious.

While she was working in the jewelry factory, the foreman introduced her to an American supervisor, Marty Garfunkel, a married man with a wife and three children in Dedham, North Carolina, who took her with him to Dongguan, a city of more than six million people that was situated a short distance from Guangzhou, and had become a center of toy manufacturing. There, Jin-gen lived with Marty and worked in a factory painting cast-iron airplanes, tanks, and soldiers. They stayed in Dongguan for nine months, until her factory was shut down because inspectors discovered it was using lead paint, at which point Marty brought her with him to Hong Kong, where he got her a job as hostess in an exclusive men's club.

Two months after they arrived in Hong Kong, Marty announced that he'd be returning to the States. Before his
departure, he introduced her to a heavy-set man in his sixties who liked to call himself Charles Atlas (his real name, she discovered by looking at his passport while he was asleep one night, was Joe Wanczyk), and who, when drunk and physically abusive, would keep repeating, “I was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling, sweetheart… I was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling, can you believe it?… I was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling…” the meaning of which Jin-gen didn't understand until one of her American clients explained it to her.

Joe Wancyzk traded in currencies, and spent most of his days in his hotel suite, smoking and following exchange rates on his computer. He made large profits by taking advantage of small discrepancies in the rise and fall of currencies. He also traded in women, providing companions for businessmen (primarily Japanese, American, and Indonesian) who were in Hong Kong for limited periods of time.

Jin-gen learned that several women who worked at the club had been able to persuade their American clients to arrange jobs for them in the United States as
au pairs
(American families that had adopted Chinese children were eager and willing, they'd learned, to pay a premium to obtain Chinese
au pairs
), and when she'd been with Joe for nearly a year and he informed her he'd be returning to New York sometime soon, she asked if he would get her a job with a family in America. To her surprise, he liked the idea, and said he'd see what he could do, provided that if he succeeded, she would find ways on her days off and vacations to service clients he sent her way.

At this point, she explained, her bad luck became her good luck. As Joe's departure grew near—he'd been living in Hong Kong for eight years and, overweight and often short of breath, had become increasingly anxious about his health—he also became increasingly abusive, which made her job difficult, since men—this was particularly true of the Japanese—did not like their women to have any bruises or blemishes. Make-up, she
said, only went so far, and the more Joe beat her, the less desirable she became to his clients.

This—we were lying in bed before dawn on Sunday morning when she gave me the news—was when she met Nick.

“You knew Nick in Hong Kong?!”

“Yes.”

“Then the two of you were…?”

She put a hand over my mouth.

“Shh,” she said, and pulled my head down to her chest. Though the news that she'd known Nick in Hong Kong surprised me, what she said next astonished. “We were good friends only,” Jin-gen stated, “and not in ways I was with other men, but that does not matter, Charlie, because what you must know first and last and always is that Nick is one of the kindest human beings who has ever lived.”

“
Nick
?!” I exclaimed, and started to sit up. “Look. Nick's many things, and he's been a good friend to me, but…”

“Shh,” she said again. “Listen to me. I am not the only woman to whom Nick has been kind. I can introduce you to others whose lives have been saved by him.
Saved
, Charlie! Can you understand? If not for him, we…”

Then she began to weep, and the next thing I knew I was holding her to my chest, and telling her it was okay, that I was listening, that I wanted to hear more, that I'd try to believe her.

But
Nick
? I thought to myself.
Nick Falzetti?

When Nick and I hung out at the reunion, we'd exchanged stories of what we'd been doing since he and Trish had split, and he'd told me about working in the garment business in New York for a while—sales and marketing—and that he'd spent most of his time after that in the Far East, wheeling and dealing with clothing manufacturers, local businessmen, and with customs and tax officials. He'd started out with small firms that made their bundles in one place and then, when labor costs rose, took their businesses to the next place—India or Vietnam,
Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines—wherever the cost of labor was cheaper.

Creative accounting was their specialty—how to hide profits, how not to pay bills or taxes, how to pay off people who had to be paid off, and how to stiff people less shrewd than they were. But for Nick, their most venal sin was that they were vulgar—true garmentos, he said, like guys he'd worked with in New York but without the blunt, no-nonsense New York style he loved—and once he figured out how things worked, he sought out people from companies that had contracts with bigger players—firms such as Macy's, Wal-Mart, and T.J. Maxx—and hooked up with them.

The money, perks, and hours were about the same with the large firms as they'd been with the
shlock
companies, but working with the
shlock
companies had taken its toll, and for a guy who'd always prided himself on being fit, he found he was feeling sluggish too much of the time, especially during working hours, when he couldn't stop daydreaming about being somewhere else. He was also drinking and whoring more, and the more he did, the more obsessed he became about getaways and about carving out a different life, so that when, at a resort in Borneo—in Sarawak, where he'd gone for a weekend of scuba-diving—he met a South African who owned several palm oil plantations and they hit it off, he'd asked the man to make him an offer he wouldn't want to refuse.

“I've never been famous for what's in here,” I remember Nick saying—tapping on his chest with his knuckles—“but it was the children who got to me. Seeing little kids—this was in the factories where I started out, not the more legit places—but seeing kids of two, three, and four years old sleeping in filth, and kids not much older working all day in mud up to their ankles, and then the way the mothers would stare at me with all their fucking pain—and with calculation equal to the pain: ‘Hey, if I look miserable enough, maybe you'll give me some money, or a
chit for an extra meal, or some medicine'—this got to me, and it got to me not when I was there, hip-deep in it, but when I was already gone and working for companies that didn't allow the worst of these conditions.”

I remember Nick saying I probably wouldn't believe him—that if he heard what he was saying he probably wouldn't believe himself either, but that it was as if, after the fact—when he thought he was free of the glooms—some huge wave had risen up, knocked him down, and rolled over him.

He'd grabbed my wrist then and squeezed so hard I had to pry up one of his thumbs. “Sorry,” he said. “But you can't know what it's like to see people living in their own puke and diarrhea, with women and older kids cleaning up the younger ones every morning so a foreman won't kick them out. To see kids going around begging, some with no hands, or only two or three fingers, or one eye, or none, and having to wonder if they were born that way, or if that was just some ordinary part of getting with the program…”

I pressed my eyes closed, to get shut of Nick's voice.

“Tell me what happened,” I said to Jin-gen.

“You will believe me then—about Nick?”

“I hope so,” I said, but even as I said the words, I was remembering that the whole time he was telling me about how much he felt for Asian kids on the other side of the world, he never said a word about his own son—about Gabe—and how he was doing. And in Singapore, when we'd been working together, our offices adjoining, though he talked about Trish once in a while—telling me he sent her money regularly, and reminding me about crazy stuff the three of us used to do together—he never mentioned Gabe.

“What I think,” Jin-gen said, “is that your friend Nick—
our
friend Nick—has more heart than appears on his sleeve. That is one of your expressions, yes?”

“Not quite, but I like it better the way it comes from your mouth.”

“Better? Better than what—better than the way your Shakespeare said it?”

“How'd you know it's from Shakespeare?”

“Nick told me when I recited the words one time—he said I was quoting your Shakespeare.”

“As far as I know, Shakespeare hasn't become an American yet.”

“I know
that
!” she said. “I am not a stupid, passive Chinese woman!”

“Hey, it was a joke,” I said, and added that I'd meant what I said as a
compliment
—that I preferred her way of phrasing it, and I went on to ask if she knew that the line was from
Othello
, and that it was spoken not by Othello but by Iago, and I added that my father told me that people found it surprising that a character famous for being devious and evil could have uttered a line most people thought of as revealing generous impulses.

“So tell me something, Charlie, are you finished talking yet?”

“Probably.”

“Then tell me something else: Would you like to hear first about Nick's heart… or about his sleeve?”

I laughed. “Both,” I said and, as if to apologize for the way I'd reacted to what she'd said about Nick, I told her that Nick had talked to me, and with feeling, about factories in China where he'd worked, and about how seeing the way children lived had gotten to him.

“That is not what I am talking about,” Jin-gen said. “You should listen more carefully. Nick did not save children. He saved women, but if you are too jealous to want to know about this, and of his kindness to me, I will say nothing else.”

“Talk to me,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “But we should eat while I talk,” and saying this, she got out of bed and ordered me to stay put. When I
protested, she told me again to stay where I was, and gave me her assurances that
all
her services had been well paid for in advance.”

I did what she said—in the moment, I felt too defeated somehow to do anything else—and about twenty minutes later, when we were eating breakfast on the terrace, she began telling me about Nick, and about how, when he was in Hong Kong and not long before he began working for the palm oil company we both worked for now, he'd had many girlfriends.