I Stand Corrected (21 page)

M
y solitary hours writing comportment lessons sequestered in a hotel apartment produced an intense appreciation for daily walks. One afternoon, I noticed light-colored corrugated tiles in the middle of sidewalks not far from the hotel. The tiles formed narrow and fractured pathways that ignored the trajectories of the sidewalks in which they were embedded. One led up to a tree and, rather than loop around, simply reappeared on the tree’s other side. Another vanished altogether, like the unfinished motorways in the middle of China’s countryside.

I asked the hotel manager the purpose for the disoriented tile paths.

“The paths are for the blind,” he explained.

“But they lead straight into danger.”

The manager laid out his defense.

“No, madam,” said he.

I decided not to argue, but I took to heart what was left unsaid.

THE CORNEA IS the transparent outer lens of the eye. Providing most of the eye’s optical power, it covers the iris, pupil, and anterior chamber, which contains the retina. There are five
layers of cornea. The summer I was seventeen, a rogue virus ate through four of the five corneal layers of my eyes. It only took four days—one day for each layer—for most of my vision to disappear. Just like that.

I assume the Fates decided that eliminating the better part of my sight was not melodramatic enough, because they added debilitating pain. The virus attacked and destroyed my corneal nerve endings and, like nuclear waste, wantonly leveled everything in its path. Though one eye in particular was under attack, the other suffered the same searing sensation of being stabbed with an ice pick. “Sympathetic pain” was what it was called, but no one could provide an explanation. In fact, the very identity of the virus eluded the medical experts. When there was nothing more to destroy, the mysterious virus departed as quickly as it had arrived. In its wake: one eye, a chalky blue-white, was made opaque by scar tissue; the other, barely functioning, remained a defiant, angry blood-red.

“Donor material” is the euphemism for corneas from a recently deceased person who, beforehand, possessed both foresight and generosity. After placing my name on a list, I waited for someone to die and leave me his eyes. Because the donor material couldn’t be refrigerated, I would be required to arrive at the hospital at a moment’s notice. In an age before mobile phones, the wait held me hostage in a small Boston apartment from which there was no stepping out, even briefly.

The Chinese have always believed that music reaches the world of souls and spirits. When I lost my sight, music transported me to that invisible world. Isaac Albéniz led me on walks in the Spanish countryside. Percy Grainger invited me to stroll in English gardens. Aaron Copland serenaded me down the Grand Canyon. Gustav Holst swept me through the firmament. My imagination was put into service, and—not always, but sometimes—the difference between what I heard and what I imagined seeing was indistinguishable.

“The Fourth of July weekend is only a week away,” was the pep talk from one of the well-meaning doctors who had signed onto my case. “There’ll be plenty of traffic fatalities,” he reassured me.

IF PROUST WAS right and the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, I am that literal interpretation. It was a fifty-year-old man—killed not in holiday traffic but by a brain tumor—who returned my vision. My eyes have now accumulated more than a century of sight on behalf of both genders, and I am fortunate to be able to see clearly that which lies ahead of me, including China’s antithetical pathways for the blind.

THERE WERE OTHER, more lighthearted discoveries made in the immediate area of the St. Regis Hotel.

One was a neighborhood called Yabaolu. The name means “elegant treasure road” and had been beautified from the original Yaba Hutong, or “mute man’s alley.” Business signs there are in Russian written in Cyrillic. The ethnic enclave consists predominately of fur traders from Siberia, but there are also Poles and Ukrainians who owned pelt stalls on what is appropriately named Alien Street.

Directly across from Alien Street is the relative quiet of Ritan Park. One of four royal shrines, it was built in 1530 as a place of worship for the Ming and Qing imperial courts. Within its walls is an eleven-hundred-year-old cypress with twisting, upwardly pointing branches. Not far from the ancient tree, old women practice traditional dance and old men do tai chi in the mornings. Skulking around the periphery are feral cats.

In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing’s homeless were shipped away and the thousands of cats roaming the city were rounded up. Both the homeless and the cats returned, and though it is not accepted practice among the Chinese to feed the homeless, cats are another matter. In the late afternoons—before it becomes dark—legions of cats tentatively emerge from the city’s nooks to be fed by the old people. Their increasing numbers in the park might explain the corresponding
decrease in the number of squirrels, and the reason cameras come out whenever a lone squirrel is spotted.

Unlike the Chinese, I am not charmed by squirrels, the result of an unattractive encounter with one years ago in New York.

Admittedly, I made the mistake of feeding the squirrel when he first appeared on the windowsill of my brownstone apartment. A shelled walnut gave the squirrel an excellent reason to reappear the next morning. Summarily ignoring our cat on the other side of the glass, the squirrel stood on his hind legs in order to make eye contact with me. He waited expectantly for a repeat of the walnut. When it wasn’t offered, he defecated on the sill. His effrontery disgusted me and appalled the cat.

On the third morning, the squirrel scratched furiously at the windowpane, and the darker implications began to sink in.

By the fourth morning—when I realized I was being prevented from cracking the window to let in fresh air—the squirrel lost all charm.

I opened the window and sprayed him in the face with glass cleaner. He staggered backward and fell off the sill.

Having survived my frontal attack, the squirrel launched a devastating one of his own. I came home from work to discover he’d dug up all three of my carefully cultivated window boxes. It was brazen destruction of personal property, and I was left with no choice but to call an exterminator.

“What will it take to get rid of him?” I asked.

“He has to be caught and moved,” he said.

“Fine,” I agreed. “But I don’t want him killed. Once you’ve caught the squirrel, throw a sheet over the trap, walk it across the street, and let him out in Central Park.”

“It’s not that simple,” said the exterminator. “Squirrels have incredible homing instincts. He’ll need to be relocated on the other side of a body of water so he doesn’t find his way back.”

“Jesus, this sounds more complicated than the witness protection program. What about the other side of the Turtle Pond behind the zoo?”

“That’s too close.”

“How about the reservoir on Ninetieth Street?”

“That will work,” said the exterminator. “I’ll be at your apartment Monday morning.”

“Is that the soonest you can come? I can’t crack any of the windows. The damn thing will squeeze through.”

“We don’t work on weekends. Monday morning, I’ll set the trap. You’ll find him in it by the time you come home. Store it in your basement overnight and I’ll pick it up Tuesday morning.”

“Wait, do you mean I store the trap with the squirrel in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Overnight?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I’m not going to store the squirrel in the basement of a brownstone building. I’ll meet you at the apartment at three o’clock on Monday. I promise, if food is involved, the squirrel will show up.”

On the designated day, at the designated time, I left the office to watch someone charge me a small fortune to bait a squirrel cage with a tablespoon of peanut butter. The trap was placed on the window ledge. Not one minute later, the squirrel appeared. So nonchalant was he that when the trap door shut, he didn’t bother looking up.

“Will you drive your car up in front of the building?” asked the exterminator as he lifted the trapped but unconcerned squirrel through the open window and into my apartment.

“I don’t keep a car in the city,” I said.

“Well, how am I supposed to get the squirrel to the reservoir?”

“Are you telling me that you took public transportation to get here?”

“That’s right.”

“You never said anything about a car. And I have to get back to the office for a four o’clock meeting. I’ll put you in a cab.”

“Lady, not even a New York cabdriver will pick me up when he sees what I’m carrying.”

“Well, just what do you suggest we do?” I asked, restraining my temper.

“What about a car service?” he suggested.

Twenty minutes later, a town car arrived in front of my apartment to transport the squirrel, along with his real estate broker, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The expense of my New York encounter with the squirrel did not endear me to the few that appeared in Ritan Park. But I do share the Chinese people’s fondness for ducks. Tucked in one of the pathways behind the park was a makeshift storefront no larger than a phone booth belonging to an old man who fixed bags, belts, and shoes. I brought all of my leather items under the pretense of repair so that I could check the progress of an orphaned duckling that trailed behind the man’s small dog—small because owning a not-small dog is technically illegal in China, though Chairman’s family had two extremely large Labrador retrievers in snow white.

I
n the opposite direction of the leather man, his dog, and his duckling was the Silk Market. Its eponymous product is sold on the third floor and takes up only a very small part of the large market, which contains some seventeen hundred retail stalls filled to the brim with knockoffs of Western brands of clothing, makeup, suitcases, toys, ties, digital cameras, mobile phones, binoculars, and everything in between. China’s stance on the issue of trademark infringement appears on an enormous red sign at the main entrance, which states—without the slightest trace of parody—that all goods in the market are guaranteed to be authentic and of good quality. Unprepared tourists are seen reduced to tears as they try to fend off aggressive salesgirls accosting them in the aisles. With no set prices, bargaining is a process of one-upmanship played out on calculators.

Less chaotic is Panjiayuan, Beijing’s giant flea market. Known as the “dirt market” because it was exaggeratedly claimed that peasants would cart in objects they’d unearthed, it features every imaginable curio and antique, including snuff bottles, porcelain bowls, Tibetan beads, white jade, bronze wares, and paintings of landscapes on long rolls of silk and paper. My regular sojourns to Panjiayuan were in the company of Roger, a colleague since my days at Hearst. His Saturday visits to the market had stretched over twenty years.

Roger appeared to have stepped out of a Graham Greene novel. He wrote poetry, spoke several Asian languages, possessed a Homeric knowledge of Asia-related matters, had belonged to the Australian foreign service, and had at one point very likely been a spy. By the time we met, he held a senior post at Phoenix Satellite Television, a major TV station in China not owned or run by the state.

Adding to Roger’s aura of mystery was his impressively large collection of Chinese erotica. That he was a gentleman provided us with the unspoken understanding that I would never see this collection. It also allowed me an unencumbered friendship not only with him but with his delightful wife and daughter.

Erotica in China can be traced to the first century. It featured an infinitely diverse range of sexual prospects performed in ambitiously acrobatic positions often by more than two people. Chinese erotica flourished in the tenth century, when it drew its influence from the courtesan culture of the imperial courts. At some point in the seventeenth century, China adopted an extreme prudishness and erotica was forbidden.

In the Confucian
Analects
, it reads, “The Master said, ‘I have never met a man who loves ethics more than he does sex,’ ” which presupposes that the former precludes the latter. The Cultural Revolution renounced sexual impulses and demanded they be redirected to the political cause. Mao institutionalized the separation of the sexes, an instinct that still remains among young people in China. In general, sex has been relegated to the functional purpose of reproducing and—to a measured degree—reserved for physical gratification within marriage. Premarital sex is not considered an aspiration of women’s liberation. However, I’ve seen sex shops in China, even though pornography is illegal there.

There is sex and there is love, and, in China, it seems the two are not well known to each other. Love poetry in classical Chinese literature never achieved the same sublime rank it did in Western literature. Even with their low-tide approach, romance poems were reinterpreted as moral allegories by Confucius.
Centuries later, communism assigned the idea of love a devotional purpose, grounded in sociopolitical issues.