China, Heart and Soul

Chapter 5 GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER? When I emerged from behind the Sheraton’s Great Wall frontage two evenings later, Ping Ping stood waiting at the curb alongside a sky blue taxi. During my first visit to Suzhou six months earlier, every cab in the city had been red; now blue appeared to be the state-approved color. They were all still Volkswagen Santanas, but to Suzhouren, they were “Sahn-tuh-nah’s.” The taxi looked like Jonah’s whale with Ping Ping standing alongside its open door. Strangely, large objects didn’t make her seem small so much as she made them seem oversized. Even me. At just 5’7”, I felt like Goliath every time I stood next to her. Her dark clothing, all grays and blacks, only diminished her presence further in the fading light. “Hi, Ping Ping.You look nice. You really like dark clothes, don’t you?” She had worn mostly black and white since my arrival. “I’m not have many color things,” she replied. “My skin no good for color. The foreign lady have white skin, can every color wear it.” “That’s not true. I see Chinese women wearing colorful clothes in Suzhou. They’d look nice on you, too.” “They are white skin. I’m skin too yellow,” she persisted. “Color looking funny.” Several people stared at us from a nearby bus stop. Foreigners were always objects of curiosity, but this time, I could imagine the scenario playing out in their heads: Chinese woman waits in cab outside Westerners’ hotel, waiguoren comes out to meet her, they take off for the evening.… “We’re going to her parents’ for dinner!” I wanted to yell at them. “Is it far to your parents’ house?” “Not far. Fifty minutes.” “Fifty minutes?” I gasped, pronouncing the first word with exaggerated clarity. “Wu shi?” Ping Ping laughed at her mistake as we drove off. “Shi wu fen. Fifteen minutes.” “Fen is minutes?” I asked. “The same fen as the money fen?” The Chinese fen is 1/100 of a yuan, like a penny to a dollar. “Yes, same character,” she replied.” In China, time apparently really was money. There was so much to see as our taxi sped through the city. Things looked vaguely familiar yet inescapably different, as though processed through a cultural phase shift. A storefront sign in English proclaimed, “Massage and Lie Fallow.” Rows of clothing shops and shoe stores formed street-level strip malls, but many of the shops were hardly bigger than tool sheds. Bare-walled, fluorescent-lighted restaurants contained just five or six small tables, while open air stands on the sidewalks sold almost anything that could be steamed or fried. We passed one intersection featuring McDonald’s golden arches and a karaoke joint crowned with “KTV” in brilliant pink, blue, and yellow neon, then another intersection bearing the unlikely English triplet of the Friendship Hotel, Tom’s Bar, and Christina’s Bakery. At a red light, Ping Ping suddenly pointed out a black Buick in front of us. “Personal car!” she exclaimed with the excitement of a birdwatcher spying a rare specimen. “How do you know?” “The number,” she said, pointing at the license plate. “Suzhou car every have ‘SuE’ and number.” I glanced at the plate. The Chinese character 苏(the first half of SuZhou) and an English letter E were followed by a four-digit number. “SuE1 and SuE2 is government car, SuE5 and SuE6 company car. Personal car is SuE7 or SuE8,” Ping Ping explained. By my reckoning, that left only a thousand numbers available for the three spaces following SuE7, and another thousand numbers after SuE8. I stared at the license plate, incredulous—it would only take two thousand personal cars to exhaust this plate-numbering scheme in a district with over six million people. While I was contemplating this mathematical limitation, Ping Ping offered another strange observation. “This car is foreign person,” she stated as though it was obvious. “How can you know this?” “The car number is 7644.” The license plate number was indeed SuE7644, but I didn’t see the connection. “How does the license plate number tell you whether the owner is Suzhouren or waiguoren?” Ping Ping smirked as she answered. “China person not have this number, four-four. This number no good, only foreign person take it. They not know how is bad.” “Why is forty-four a bad number?” I asked again, still confused. “Not forty-four bad, four bad. Chinese word four is si, same sound like death. This car number, four-four is bad. China person say, ‘Death, death.’” “I don’t think most foreign people are very superstitious about numbers. Whoever owns this car is probably not worried about his license plate having two four’s on it.” “China people not want this,” Ping Ping insisted. “Give you bad fate. Is true.” Our taxi forged ahead while I contemplated the notion of unlucky numbers. We had thirteen in America, but not because the word sounded like something bad. I didn’t even know why thirteen was considered unlucky. “Nan Yuan Lu. My street,” Ping Ping announced as we turned a corner. The road was surprisingly wide, four lanes for traffic bordered by an extra lane on either side for bikes and small motorcycles. A half-mile down the road, our taxi began climbing a gentle rise over a wide canal. The waters beneath were untrafficked, although several dozen barges lay docked along either bank. Above their cabins, the burning oil smoke of a dozen dinnertimes rose heavenward like the sinuous, blue-gray wisps of smoldering joss sticks. “Nan Yuan Qiao,” Ping Ping offered without prompting. “Bridge. Qiao is bridge.” From the bridge apex, I looked across the sweep of residential structures. Complex after complex of six-story apartment buildings simultaneously loomed large over Nan Yuan Lu and receded in every direction, blanketing the area like a domino cascade waiting for the first one to be toppled. Ping Ping spoke again. “When my parents come this area, only xiangxiaren living here, country people. Rice and vegetable growing here. My grandparents say my parents, ‘Why you living the country?’ Now everything this area is city.” “When did your family move here?” “Deng’s season, 1984.” For the twenty-five hundred years leading to Deng’s “Great Opening” to the West, Suzhou had failed even to fill the mere six square miles enclosed within its ancient moat. Now, just fifteen years later, there were no farms or fields anywhere in sight as we moved beyond the city’s ancient southeastern boundary. A half-mile past the bridge, our taxi driver steered smoothly over to the curb, unceremoniously cutting off two bicycles and a small motorbike. The meter read twenty-five yuan, barely three dollars for Ping Ping’s round trip to the Sheraton and back, but when I started to pay thirty yuan, she placed her hand firmly over mine. “No tip!” she said sternly. “China people never make the tip. That is his job. If no good, boss tell him go away. Why you pay extra for his job? America people so foolish, all waste your money.” I paid the driver twenty-five yuan. We stepped out onto a broad sidewalk and wove our way through an obstacle course of parked bicycles and pedal carts, shopkeepers’ stools, a meager inventory of plastic combs and brushes spread over newspaper on the sidewalk, and a peddler dangling counterfeit Nike sports bags from either end of a long bamboo pole. A circle of chain-smoking xiangxiaren sat on their haunches at the curb, arguing raucously over their poker hands. Nearby, thin white clouds hovered over four industrial-sized bamboo steamers. I wanted to stop and kan kan, to “look, look” as Ping Ping translated it, but she clearly wanted me off the sidewalk and out of public sight. She pulled me into a small lane that slipped away from Nan Yuan Lu so unassumingly I hadn’t noticed it. “This my parents’ street. Nan Huan Xin Cun,” she answered my question before I could ask. I recognized the name.