The Cost of Hope Read online

I start across the room to offer to help, when a sudden torrent of rapid-fire, colloquial Chinese bursts out of him. He speaks so fast I can’t understand anything he says. He hangs up the phone and turns to me.

  “I live in a hotel,” he says. “I’ve asked the desk to send a car to get us.”

  Us?

  I see I really haven’t much of a choice. We are the only two passengers left in the airport, and the last of the lights are going out. As we wait for the car, I watch in amazement as he begins pulling videotapes out from every wrinkle in his clothing. He is smoking, talking, and unloading all at once. His outside pockets. Inside pockets. Pants pockets. Inside his bloused-out shirt. His front waistband. His rear waistband. Altogether he stacks more than twenty cassettes that he had just smuggled in. The Quiet Man. All About Eve. Apocalypse Now. Lawrence of Arabia. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Maltese Falcon. Vertigo. The Big Sleep. Dr. Strange-love. Bonnie and Clyde. Top Hat. They are all classics, and they aren’t illegal. It’s just that bored officials with no other entertainment have a habit of taking videos to check for subversive material and then “losing” them.

  “I have more than five hundred movies in my apartment,” he boasts. “I tape them off TV in the U.S. and bring them in every trip.”

  Despite his grin, it is clear that I was wrong in supposing that he hadn’t noticed me boarding. He is peevish.

  “I tried to talk to you the whole plane ride home. I kept walking back and all I saw was your feet.”

  “I was asleep.”

  “I went back a whole bunch of times and all there was to talk to was Mel Searls.” Mel is the portly and kindly U.S. embassy commercial counselor. This is obviously my fault.

  “I was asleep,” I repeat.

  “I like Mel, but I can’t talk to him for five hours.”

  “I WAS ASLEEP.” This guy is ticking me off.

  “So now what’s going to happen is you’re going to come back to my place and we will watch a movie, have a drink, and eat some treats.”

  Uh, I think, that is not even close to what is going to happen. I am going to go home to bed. Alone.

  Jet lag is my only explanation for what comes next. It is 1:00 a.m. in Beijing, but my body thinks it is 1:00 p.m. in New York. On the drive home I confront the reality that back at my miserable apartment I will face at least six terrible hours in my empty cinder-block office/home standing on the balcony unable to sleep but unable to do much else either. So when the car pulls up to my door—the soldier waved us past when he saw the white faces inside—I drop my luggage in the apartment and rejoin him.

  He lives down the road in the Jianguo Hotel, the first new hotel built in China since the 1950s. It is a joint venture modeled on a California Holiday Inn and it is a foreigners’ oasis, with new carpets, polite staff, a private supply of salad greens grown without benefit of human manure, and a small restaurant serving hamburgers. Journalists and diplomats live in compounds. Business-people live in hotels. He has scored the Jianguo, the only one of its kind in China.

  He opens the door to his home, a seventeen-by-seventeen room downstairs with a few steps leading to another room the same size upstairs. It is a standard-issue Holiday Inn hotel room, complete with a painting over the sofa of birches reflected in a pond. Except for one thing: It is stuffed like a warehouse from top to bottom. He opens the door to the downstairs half bath. It can no longer be used as a bath, as it is packed tight to the ceiling with labeled boxes. There are boxes reading “Videos: Classic”; “Videos: Japanese”; “Videos: Christmas”; “Videos: Film Noir/Detective/Crime.” He files away his latest stash. I see boxes of Christmas decorations and what appears to be a full-size artificial Christmas tree swathed in plastic. There are boxes labeled “Halloween” and “Fourth of July.” There is a flagpole and large American flag, a dart board, a badminton set. There are musical instruments. A banjo. A small tuba. There are boxes marked “cameras,” “darkroom equipment,” and “entomology.” I can see insect nets and tracing paper and huge aluminum-shrouded lights, the kind used in those days for lighting close-ups. There are games. Monopoly. Parcheesi. Backgammon. In the spare, featureless, empty landscape of Beijing, his room assaults my senses.

  Upstairs, his bedroom can barely be called a bedroom. The standard-issue Holiday Inn king is the only bare spot. He has constructed bookshelves and packed them with books in, as far as I can tell, at least six languages. One whole set of shelves is devoted to cooking gear. A clearly unapproved hot plate. Saucepans. Frying pans. A Dutch oven. Whisks and slotted spoons, wooden spatulas and pancake turners. A waffle iron. Boxes and boxes of cake mix and canned fruit, cans of cinnamon and sugar and vanilla and cocoa powder and garlic salt. He also has a full set of barware, shot glasses and tumblers and martini glasses, a shaker, narrow-mouthed white-wine glasses and wide-bowled red-wine glasses, beer steins with handles, an ice bucket with tongs, and tall glasses for gin and tonic.

  I pick a demure Drambuie from a shelf crammed with every form of wine, liquor, and liqueur imaginable—all in tiny, one-serving airline bottles. Clearly this is a man who does a lot of flying. He pours out a dish of mixed nuts and one of cookies, both hand-carried in from home. “Treats!” he says. We settle in to watch Tom Jones.

  By the end of the movie the sun is coming up. We have barely spoken. I try to make conversation but it is plain that there is a right way and a wrong way to watch movies with Mr. Foley. Total silence and concentration is the right way. Any kind of distracting small talk is the wrong way. I stand to go. He walks over and stands facing me. Here it comes, I think. Then he reaches past me and pulls a map of China from one of the shelves. He is suddenly all business, and talking rapidly.

  “So here is what we are going to do.” It isn’t a question.

  “There are seventeen cities we’re allowed to visit now. Over the next couple of years there will be more. If we start now, we can get to all of them by the time our tour is up. You’re probably here for what—two, three years? If I need to, I can extend my tour. So can you, I suppose, if we need to. There’s Kunming, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan …” He begins rattling off the names of Chinese cities.

  “We’ll travel all over China together. We’ve got to start right away. We haven’t got that much time. You are going to be somebody. You’re going to need somebody to take care of you. We’ll see everything we can in China. Then we’ll get married in the Great Hall of the People—I think they are letting foreigners get married there now—but anyway, we can get married again back home, and then we’ll have a raft of kids. We have to get moving.”

  Who is this guy? What is he saying? Did he just ask me to marry him? Oddly enough, it is his phrasing that strikes me first. A raft of kids? Who says “raft”? For that matter, who says “treats”? Who proposes to a woman he doesn’t know—who clearly is hostile to him—after one evening watching movies together? This guy is out of his mind. I thank him for the movie and the drink and leave, intending that this meeting be our last.

  • • •

  The next day, I find myself climbing Coal Hill with him. From the top of the hill, behind the Forbidden City, wrapped up against the razor wind, we can see down into the Imperial Palace and across the city. The next day, another movie. Then a tour around Tiananmen Square. Then dinner. Then a night in his room, then a night in mine. Soon he is writing his reports after midnight at my interpreter’s desk while I struggle to get a story through the balky telex machine. And I am setting up a portable typewriter on a TV table in his bedroom.

  Why do I keep meeting with this man? At forty-four, he’s twelve years older than I am. He’s chubby. No, he’s overweight. He wears owl glasses and bow ties. He’s crazy. And we’re angry with each other almost twenty-four hours a day.

  Probably the searing loneliness of our surroundings has something to do with it. I have been here only a little more than a year and the tension of the aloneness is already close to breaking me. It is a different kind of loneliness than I have ever experienced, a kind of bla
ck hole that pulls me down as if underwater and often ends in panic. He feels it too. He has been here for more than three years already, and he tells me about long nights sitting immobile on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, or pacing the room frantically, so fiercely lonely he believes he will go mad.

  Visitors nod sagely. Of course it is hard. There are no movies or bookstores or symphonies or bars. No cereal, or familiar shampoo, or drinkable tap water or Tampax. A handful of places serve what passes for Western food, but it is just familiar enough to spark loneliness, not satisfaction. Yes, the tourists say pityingly; they understand.

  The truth is, they understand nothing. Nothing about the lack of creature comforts really matters. We can live without hamburgers. We can live without peanut butter or Special K or maple syrup. We pack in treats for one another from our home leaves—chocolate, good coffee. And if we were addicted to Bloomingdale’s or Bergdorf’s—well, then we probably wouldn’t be here in the first place, would we?

  No, what matters is the aloneness, an aloneness that extends to everything around us. During the Cultural Revolution the Party ordered the grass dug up, the wild birds hunted down and killed, and dogs and cats banned as pets. There are no colors or sounds or movements to distract us. Then there is the isolation. Shunning is a biblical punishment—isolate the sinners, ignore them, refuse them eye contact and conversation. The shunned call it torture. Here, an entire nation shuns us.

  A request for directions on the street is met with a frightened stare and silence. Many of us are surreptitiously followed to see whom we meet. The few of us who have managed to make Chinese friends wrap ourselves in scarves and hats and venture out to prearranged locations only after dark. Much later, an embassy official will tell me that Beijing is far lonelier and more alienating than even her Peace Corps assignment was in an African village an hour’s walk from the nearest town. Where she lived in Africa, she says, there was a gentle human contact that is almost totally missing in Beijing in 1984.

  For centuries China has perfected the art of a formalized courtesy that keeps outsiders at bay. Casual visitors to Beijing come away charmed by the hospitality, the toasts, the speeches, the food. What few realize is that their second banquet will be identical to their first. And that the third and fourth will be the same as the opening two. And that the second month will have the identical scripted human contact as the first. The scripts are so well understood, and the fear of deviating from them so strong, that by my sixth month I can pass for fluent in Chinese. Anyone sitting next to me at a banquet would assume that I am a relaxed and confident conversationalist, when in reality I have simply memorized a dozen call-and-response tropes. How long have you been here? A year. Are you used to it? Oh yes, at first I was lonely, but now I am used to it. Do you like Chinese food? Yes, I do, I love Chinese food. China is a big country, with many people. Yes, indeed. That is true. China is very big. Do you have children? No, I don’t. And you? A boy? Congratulations. A girl? Well, girls are good too.

  When we leave our guarded compounds, we must walk fast, for otherwise a crowd will form. A silent, staring circle surrounds us whenever we pause. The bolder will reach out to touch. But mostly they just look. We feel like exotic beasts caged by curiosity in a very large zoo.

  I respond to this by becoming smaller, retreating more and more into myself, curling inward into a small package. Terence is the opposite. He hurls his loneliness and frustration outward. He becomes as big as a volcano and every bit as unpredictable. Surrounded by a crowd on a particularly down day, I begin to cry. He, instead, takes a swing at the nearest gawker, a stopped cyclist, who saddles up and takes off in terror, pedaling as fast as he can go. At dinners and gatherings around town we routinely lament the conditions of our captivity. The rooms or apartments in which we are confined cost our employers fifty thousand dollars a year or more. There are two price tags for everything in China. One for the residents, another, ten times or more higher, for foreigners. Most of us grouse. Terence shouts.

  “They are thieves! Lying, stealing thieves. All it is for them is gouge, gouge, gouge. How much can they gouge from the stupid foreigners? Lie! Lie! Lie! Gouge! Gouge! Gouge!”

  He embarrasses and frightens me. I shout back.

  “This is their culture. They are poor. We are rich. They just want to get as much as they can to improve their lives. You are such a bigot!”

  “Since when is it bigoted to not like being gouged?” He gives no quarter. “They’re thieves.”

  Others keep their complaints within the walls of diplomatic compounds and private conversations, smiling politely and toasting when outside. Not Terence. Every encounter is an opportunity for loud expression of his views.

  When he decides that I cannot be a proper foreign correspondent without a trench coat he takes matters into his own hands. He brings a bolt of khaki material back to Beijing from one of his trips to the United States. He hustles me over to the Youyi Shangdian—the special Friendship Store where only foreigners are allowed to buy, and only with hard currency. Inside, a tiny tailor shop will make up clothes to order. He designs the Bogey-style coat himself, with a stand-up collar, a big leather buckle, and pockets for jamming my hands into. We are there for our first fitting. The model the tailor has produced is sloppily constructed and looks nothing like what Terence has drawn.

  “You guys wonder why you’re a third-world country? There’s no excuse for this. Everything you do is half-assed and then you charge top dollar.” His voice is crescendoing as he shouts down the woman behind the counter.

  “What does this look like? What does this look like?” His Chinese is perfectly pitched.

  She stands silent before the torrent.

  “Does this look like what I gave you?” His face is red. His shouting is beginning to attract attention. I am embarrassed.

  “I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU!” he roars. “ALL OF YOU. I HATE YOU!”

  WO HEN HEN NIMEN!

  The guttural “h” and the sharply dropping fourth tone of the second “hen”—hate—make the outburst particularly effective.

  I want to run. I want to hit him. I want to hide.

  Somehow, however, everybody but me seems to figure Terence out.

  A manager emerges from behind the curtain.

  “What’s going on?” he asks the clerk.

  “He’s mad at us again,” she says.

  “Oh,” says the manager and turns back to his work.

  Terence Bryan Foley.

  Who is this strange man anyway?

  Is he a spy?

  His combination of nonstop revelation and a kind of hazy secrecy makes it very hard to answer that—or any other—question about him. I worry constantly that he is some kind of agent. For one thing, everyone I know thinks he is. For another, he will never answer the question consistently. Sometimes, he hoots with derision and mocks the questioners. “I’m a graduate of an Ivy League school. I was educated in New York,” he says—Columbia University, it turns out. “I dress nicely and I speak fluent Chinese—none of your snobby East Coast journalist buddies can believe that I’m really from the Midwest and working for farmers. Soybeans? C’mon. Get REAL. The guy’s GOTTA be a spy!”

  Sometimes he simply sounds like the kind of moron who likes to tell half-truths to impress his girlfriend. “The CIA? Well, I’m not really on the books …”

  Over the months I learn that he was born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was raised there, the fourth-generation son of a long line of German farmers and Irish immigrants. He had been trying to get to China all his life. Most improbably, he has been pursuing the romantic ideals of Song and Tang dynasty poets ever since he was a little boy. The pastor of the church Terence attended as a child had been raised in prerevolutionary China by his missionary parents. In 1952—the year I was born, in fact—he gave the twelve-year-old Terence a book of Chinese characters, and Terence was hooked. Terence began to study Chinese on his own, picking out the characters one by one. Later he enraged his paren
ts by dropping out of Ohio State University and, without telling them, enlisting in the navy, where he trained as a Chinese language specialist. After he left the military, he finished his Chinese studies—picking up Japanese along the way—in New York. Now he reads Li Po and Du Fu in the original, a feat much like a Chinese speaker mastering Shakespeare and Beowulf.

  His head is filled with plum blossoms and mists. He can recite lines about the longing for a faraway home and about the conflicts between honor and ambition. His mental China is made up of shadowy scholars in long silken robes sitting under willow trees steeping themselves in wine and poetic meter.

  He has spent his entire adult life trying to reach this China of his imagination, a place of delicacy and sophistication, erudition and honor and dignity. The post-Mao China of squalor and spitting and secrecy, poverty, public executions, venality, and suspicion is almost more than his soul can bear. His fury at the Chinese of today, it appears, stems at least partly from their failure to be the Chinese of his imagination.

  He is a fastidious dresser, in a style right out of The Philadelphia Story: charcoal suits, often three-piece; bow ties, as I saw that first day; felt hats; carefully polished black wingtips. He is disdainful of anyone, including me, who is not careful about his or her appearance.

  During the years when China was locked up tight to outsiders, he worked with other countries. He spent years traveling around the world, helping states market their dairy products and grains, canned goods and fruits abroad. Then Terence saw his break when Nixon visited China in 1972. Terence immediately sensed that China was about to open to the West and shrewdly guessed that agriculture would be the first field to begin to develop. He began his preparations on the spot. He taught himself swine nutrition and poultry feed formulation and the Chinese vocabulary to go along with it. He knew that China would want to learn modern agricultural techniques and that America would want to sell its products. He looked around for the most likely candidate and found it in soybeans. China was a huge consumer of soybeans; America a huge producer. With nothing more than his self-education and self-confidence, he wormed his way into a job with the American Soybean Association. U.S. soybean producers, he figured, would be among the earliest groups into China. He was right. In 1980, he became one of only a handful of foreigners allowed to live in Beijing as he opened the association’s office.