Jin Zhi

Jin Zhi and I carry my bags across the grassy eld to her house in a neighborhood of houses made entirely of mud and straw. She occasionally stoops to gather handfuls of dandelion greens, tucking them into a plastic bag that hangs over her arm. It is a movement so habitual that it does not interrupt our conversation. I am so grateful to speak, and she is grateful to practice. We dont talk about personal issues, but about literature and politics. She nds Hemingway very easy to read, but likes the art of Shakespeare, though it takes much study to understand. When Clinton comes, he wont get this far west, and theyll hide all the bad-looking people in Beijing. e neighborhood is shockingly brown, muddy and depressing after the sunny stroll through the eld. ere are four or ve dirt roads lined with houses, and we turn down the rst row. Each house is surrounded by a ve-foot high wall of mud and straw to separate it from all the other identical properties. ey all look to have been built all at the same time, but are now in greatly varying states of decay. Jin Zhis is arguably the worst. e roof sags and the straw is black with mold. A brick path to the front door crosses the yard, a series of mud puddles littered with straw fallen from the roof mixed wisps of trash. Next to the front door a bucket of compost sits next to a rusty, old-fashioned water pump. Does it work? I ask Jin Zhi. She says yes, bending to demonstrate. After a few pumps of the handle water sputters onto a crumbling concrete pad that holds a shallow pool of mud, which spatters my pant legs. So sorry, Jin Zhi says. I stare at the water pump. After weeks traveling the countryside I have a new appreciation for any kind of plumbing at all, reecting on Lilys large of water in the pantry, carried from miles away, and all the truckers luguans and even businessmens hotels where buckets of water were fetched for me because the plumbing no longer worked, or never did, despite the pipes and xtures long ago set into the sinks and bathtubs. Jin Zhi wrestles with the front door. Its wooden slats barely hang together and sag into the threshold so deeply that she has to pull up violently to unstick it from the threshold. Im shocked to see that inside the house there is no proper ceiling, just the underside of the sagging roof of rotting black straw. It clearly leaks, and looks dangerously close to collapsing. We leave my bags at the door and take a quick tour. Red bricks on the oor are arranged in an lovely zigzag pattern as if someone, sometime, really cared. If there ever was mortar, it is long gone, the bricks now sit level with the dirt. A small room down the hall holds a cabinet piled with a few clothes, some jars and toothbrushes, and a bookcase lled with paperback books in Chinese and in English. ere are titles by Shakespeare, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, collections of short stories and novellas by British and American authors, and a dozen English-language lesson books. A large room beyond is the kitchen, with a linoleum table placed by a window looking out to the front at the muddy yard and the sagging property wall. On the other side of the room sits a kang next to a black pot-bellied stove, a warm sleeping place in winter. A rickety wire stand holds a plastic basin lled with dirty water, over which hangs a lthy rag. On the oor next to it sits a fallen radish, wrinkled with age.

Excuse me I am bad housewife, says Jin Zhi, picking up the radish. And my house is very bad because my salary and my husbands salary is only ve hundred yuan a month each, so we get bad house. She puts my bags on a bed in a room with a bed and nothing else. It is clearly unused, she has had no time to prepare it. You sleep here, she says. ere is no toilet in the house, so we walk down the road to a mud and straw lean-to that stinks so badly that it is impossible to suppress my gag reex. My eyes tear from the overwhelming sting of ammonia. Surprisingly, this is the worst toilet in my experience of some very, very bad toilets. Usually theyre shoveled out regularly to fertilize the elds, but something must be wrong in this neighborhood. I nish as quickly as I can, cursing communism and their shitty work ethic. ere seems to be nothing of quality in modern life. As we walk back to the house Jin Zhi tells me that she nds her job teaching college students at the agricultural school frustrating. She wants to start her own business, a kindergarten in town. ey say I am not a good teacher but I am a good teacher. Trouble is students dont want to learn, she complains. I am not bad teacher. I have bad students. ey are supposed to know English but they are bad students and they dont study, she says. In the kitchen she pushes her glasses up to the bridge of her nose and sorts through the dandelion greens while I look through her notebooks. Her written English is perfect, actually much better than mine, with neat handwriting. ere are pages and pages of grammar, of sentence diagramming. I am impressed and I say so. She smiles, showing her crooked teeth. If you stay three months my speaking English will be very good, too, she says. I smile back and say nothing. Jin Zhi and I are both starved for conversation. I listen to her frustrations about the college teaching students who dont have a chance because they dont have connections. ey know it, she says, and it makes them bad students because they are apathetic about their future. And they are girls. Girls are less important. e administration is corrupt, too. Whether teaching or administering, it is all about connections. Jin Zhi herself has no connections, so she gets no support. She elaborates on Hemingway, not a very good man, she thinks, but a lovely writer. Steinbeck, she says, is a good man, and she likes his writing. Like Hemingways it is easynot like Shakespeare, which is beautiful but dicult, and she can see that the lives of the people he wrote about were true. She feels much more connect with the lives depicted in Shakespeare than the other writers. Im confused by this for a while, and nally decide that his setting in medieval culture is much closer to the reality of Chinese rural life than that of the other writes. ey are all so dierent than Chinese writers, she says, and then, You are the only foreigner I have ever seen. Ever met, I correct. She has asked me to correct her English. It will help me learn. No, she says. I have never seen a foreigner in person on TV, yes, but never in person. Really? Not even driving by in a car? I ask. No. What would it like to live in a place where everyone is exactly alike, the same race, the same socioeconomic status? At home in San Francisco over half the population dont speak English at home.

ere are Russians, Africans, Mexicans, Asians and Europeans. ere are hipsters and homosexuals, yuppies and vagrants. Ninety-ve percent of the population in China is Han Chinese. Where there are minority races, the government relocates Han at such a rate that Han has become the majority population even in so-called minority areas. At ve oclock Jin Zhis husband comes home with their three-year old son. He is a sports teacher at the college, and it is soccer season. Jin Zhis husband wears a blue athletic suit and running shoes. He has light brown hair and eyes that slant upward and I am surprised that he speaks no English at all. e boy barely glances at me. He is a bit unmanageable, says Jin Zhi, because his father spoils him. Everything she tells him to do his father says he does not have to do. Already there is diculty with discipline. One of the problems, she admits, is that she did not want children at all. Her husband had insisted. Of course she loves her son, and now she doesnt know why she hadnt wanted children. It is good that he was a boy, she says. If wed had a girl we would have had to have another, to get a boy. I would like a girl, Jin says. But my husband must have a boy. In China, as in many countries, boys are social security. ey grow up and make money and support their parents. Girls dont make an income to share with their parents, they get married and benet their husbands families. When she becomes pregnant she can get a determination of the gender of the fetus, and if its a girl, she can abort it and try again. In places where they dont have pre-birth gender determination, many newborn girls suer mysterious deaths. Gender equality was an early benet in the communist party, with Chairman Mao proclaiming that women hold up half the sky. e right to education, work, and divorce was enforced, and there was free childcare in the workplace. But since the economic boom of the 80s there has been some serious backsliding, and a new generation of boys, called little emperors, are feared to become selsh, demanding leaders of the future. Jin Zhis son would be one of these. I watch him stamp his feet and yell, and his father smilingly giving in. I already feel sorry for his wife. Lacking equal numbers of girls, theres been a horrifying trend of bride abduction and of parents even selling o their girls. Having roamed enough of the countryside now to see that the one-child policy is so often ignored, I do not doubt it. Neither husband or son have the slightest interest in the unheard-of visit of a foreigner, even to ask the standard questions. ey are in a world of their own, and I am invisible, and I realize that Jin Zhi is invisible, too. I feel at home in Jin Zhis messy house. We watch television in her bedroom where the familys clothes are scattered about. e bed is unmade, the plaster is peeling. e big window looks out upon the yard of brown mud. e government-controlled television news is obsessed with blond Russian children digging through garbage cans in the streets of Moscow. I ask Jin Zhi to translate. She says they have been repeating the same thing for weeks, that the Russians attempt at capitalism is doomed. ey must, she says. No heat or running water, telephones or internet, but a television in every home assures the population gets the right messages.

After dinner Jin Zhis husband goes out to play Ma Jong. Jin Zhi says he cannot stop. If Ma Jong did not exist China would be a better place, she says. ey play it anywherehuddled over boxes in the shade of a roof gutter, in the corner of a restaurant, behind the counter in a store. Ive seen them absorbed in it. e game mesmerizes them, the rectangular pieces smooth and cool to the touch. e luck about to happen. Jin Zhis husband lost all of their savingsone hundred yuan, the equivalent of twelve dollars. She was devastated. She was hoping to save 1000 yuan to start a kindergarten, a cooperative school so that the families in this town wouldnt have to make the thirty minute bus ride to Linhe twice a day. It would be a good business. ere was a market for it, and shed done her research. Plus, shed checked, and the government would allow it. I want to give her the money, and start thinking on a way to do it so she wont refuse. e next day Jin Zhi goes to work and I walk through the eld to Franks shop to nd that the repairs are already nished. My ride around the block doesnt really conrm much except theres no more blue smoke and it seems to be tuned up nicely. It will take a few hundred miles of gentle riding at varied speeds to break in the new engine, to seat the new rings around the piston, but thats no hardship since roads are bad and speeds are slow anyway. Since Ive decided to stay another day or two Frank agrees to store the bike in his garage. Putting everything away, I discover that some of my tools are missing. Frank yells at the assistants, who scramble around in the shallow metal boxes until we identify my tools. All but one piece turns up, a chisel my dad ground down for me before I left, that I used as a wedge and lever, to bang apart stubborn seals. It wasnt that important, but I liked seeing it there, it reminded me of home, of my dad and I worked together in his garage. e big screwdriver would probably do the job just as well. I dont blame them for the loss, either, chalking it up to sloppiness and not maliciousness. I pay Frank exactly what he asks for without argument, and give him and both of his assistants one of the mini-ashlights I carry as gifts for mechanics, the kind that comes with a holder that they can wear on their belts. e boys are incredibly pleased but I sense that Frank is a little perturbed that he got the same gift, and not a better one. Later, as we wait for the bus to come so we can pick up her son from school, I tell Jin Zhi that I think that in the future Frank will behave better toward foreigners. She says Im being too generous, and that he will always be bad. We board, and she the bus driver have a funny little conversation that Jin Zhi doesnt want to relate. When I insist she tells me he asked why I was dressed so badly. Its true Im not dressed up but my black jeans, cowboy boots and pink button-down shirt are neat and clean. She said she tried to excuse me by telling him I am riding a motorcycle through China. But he just shrugged. All over China you see people doing physical labor in neatly pressed suit jackets, the mens are blue or black and the womens easter-egg colors. ey dont understand why rich foreigners dont always dress in ne clothing.

I make a note of that, and decide that Ill buy some nicer clothes if I come across a shop. e sidecar is certainly large enough to hold a few more things, and it would be nice not to have to launder so often, especially with the lack of running water. e ride on the modern bus is comfortable. e area is at and I can see how large the city is, about 200,000 people, says Jin Zhi. e land looks fertile. She tells me that the area has over a hundred dierent kinds of wild herbs. ey also grow and process a lot of corn. ey are number one in cashmere production and processing, and the biggest mutton market and distribution center in China. e kindergarten and grammar school on this eastern edge of Linhe looks like any school in the west. A brick wall surrounds a courtyard where there white markings are painted on the pavement for games, with a few brick buildings that stand neatly beyond. e children stream out looking for their parents. Jin Zhi pick up her son, who again, does not deign to notice me, in sharp contrast to the interest of his classmates, and we walk across the street to buy ice cream. On the way back to her house we buy groceries. She argues with me about paying, but eventually realizes that shes not going to win this battle. She doesnt really want to anyway, shes just being polite. We buy pork from the butcher and vegetables from a sidewalk stand and as we walk home across the eld, she scoops dandelion greens. Unlike Lily, Jin Zhi lets me help her cook and clean. She shows me how to make noodles, just water and our, but the right kneading technique is crucial. I dont get it quite right but she doesnt mind. I chop vegetables and go out to the front yard to get water from the pump. Her husband comes home and takes their son out to play soccer in the nearby eld before we eat. Jin Zhi and her husband dont seem to really notice each other. Did you notice that my husband is Mongolian? Jin Zhi giggles, during dinner, as if it were a scandal. I hadnt, really. Some people look a little dierent here, with lighter hair that is ne instead of thick and straight. Jin Zhi looks a little like that too, but her eyes are dark, not golden brown like the Mongolians. Immediately after dinner she and her husband have an argument, and he leaves. Hes going to play Ma Jong, Jin Zhi sighs. I will never have a business. e next morning I dress in a summer frock I packed, and a pair of sandals, to go with Jin Zhi to the agricultural college. e campus is a jumble of red brick buildings scattered on an expanse of green lawn. I sit at a metal desk in the faculty room and talk a little to the other teachers, all women who speak some English, while Jin Zhi does some administrative work. It feels like the oce of a community college at home. Lots of desks, cubbyholes, phones, and paperwork. After a while all go outside under some large leafy trees so everyone can take photographs with the foreigner, and then the bell rings. Hundreds of students stream out of all the dierent rooms. ey rush up to me so quickly that I think I might be trampled. Several girls grab me and push me into the middle of their group. ey speak English as well as they can, not as terrible, I think, as Jin Zhi blames them. ey are so eager that I know I will never forget their young faces looking earnestly into my eyes while asking and answering questions. Knowing that everything I say will be important and remembered, I politely ask each girl, in the simplest English possible, where her family lives and if they

have brothers and sisters. If she can answer that, I ask what her job will be once she graduates. Only a few can answer. e others giggle and say, Im sorry, and step back into the crowd. I am pushed and pulled and photographed for a full half-hour. Jin Zhi tries to intervene, but her authority is completely nonexistent. In a moment I can see how futile it will be for her to teach these girls as well as she wants, and to manage her son and her husband. In a ash I realize that she is not liked here at school, and she is not loved at home. I want to hug her. Finally she stands back with the rest of the faculty to watch until the dinner bell rings and they have to leave. Her favorite studentsthe ones who studyfollow us, nagging and pleading with tears in their eyes until we agree to visit their dormitory after dinner. e dormitories are crowded. ere are six beds in one small room and no desk or place to store clothing and other belongings. e girls gather around and set me down on a lower bunk, then ritually take turns shaking my hand and saying a few words in English. I ask them who is Mongolianabout half the girls are. ey are very proud of their culture, and especially of their songs. Would you mind to hear us sing a song? one girl oers, and I say of course and they sing sweetly in lovely high voices. e word must have gotten out that I am in the vicinity again and now the door is jammed with other students. After their songs, they beg me for one. is is my nightmare. I absolutely can not sing in tune and I have a very narrow range. I resist as long as I can. ey dont believe I dont sing, or dont know the words to songs, and they wont give up. Frantically I search my memory for something I know well enough to fake it, and can only come up with Oh Home on the Range. I steel myself, and sing with as much aplomb as I can, what the hell, Ill never be back here anyway twangy, nasal Chinese songs Id heard blasting non-stop from every towns speaker system. I experiment with the twang and the nasal tone they like, and of course they dont know the words so dont realize I am messing them up. What comes after where the deer and the antelope play, and the sky is not cloudy all day? I follow with and I dont know where I will stay and they are absolutely and sincerely delighted. But its not over yet. I must autograph school books. e stream of books seem never ending and I write variations of the same message in each one in a careful hand. It has been so very nice visiting with you. I wish you success in your studies and a prosperous future Finally Jin Zhi comes to the rescue, pretending to drag me away. Now I know why celebrities hide out in large houses behind walls. Just before our getaway, a sad looking girl, the one who spoke the best English, passes me a folded note on thin lined notebook paper. I open in later in bed to nd what I expect. In perfect, even eloquent English, the poor girl is begging me to help her get out of China.