The Elephant Vanishes (27 page)

When did I meet my first Chinese?

Just like that, my archaeologist begins sifting through the tell of my own past. Labeling all the artifacts, categorizing, analyzing.

And so, when
was
that first encounter? As near as I can figure, it was 1959 or 1960. Whichever, whatever, what’s the difference? Precisely nothing. The years ’59 and ’60 stand there like gawky twins in matching nerd suits. Even if I hopped a time machine back to the period, I doubt I could tell the two apart.

In spite of which, I persist with my labors. Doggedly expanding the dig, filling out the picture with every least new find. Shards of memory.

Okay, I’m sure it was the year Johansson and Patterson fought for the world heavyweight title. Which means, all I have to do is go search through the sports section in old copies of
The Year in News
. That would settle everything.

In the morning, I’m off on my bike to the local library. Next
to the main entrance, for who knows what reason, there’s a tiny henhouse, in which five chickens are enjoying what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch. It’s a bright, clear day, so before going inside I sit down on the pavement next to the chickens and light up a cigarette. I watch the chickens pecking at their feedbox busily. Frenetically, in fact, so that they look like one of those old newsreels with too few frames per second.

After my cigarette, something’s changed in me. Again, who knows why? But for what it’s worth, the new me—five chickens and a smoke away from what I was—now poses myself two questions:

First,
Who could possibly have any interest in the exact date when I met my first Chinese?

And second,
What exactly is there to be gained by spreading out those
Year In Newses
on a sunny reference-room desk?

Good questions. I smoke another cigarette, then get back onto my bike and bid farewell to fowl and file copies. If birds in flight go unburdened by names, let my memories be free of dates.

Granted, most of my memories don’t bear dates anyway. My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy.

Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory anymore? Witness the sum of what I’m capable of dredging up from primary school (those pathetic six years of sunsets in the heyday of postwar democracy). Two events: this Chinese story, for one, and for another, a baseball game one afternoon during summer vacation. In that game, I was playing center field, and I blacked out in the bottom of the third. I mean, I didn’t just collapse out of nowhere. The reason I blacked out that day was that we were allowed only one small
corner of the nearby high school’s athletic field, and so when I was running full speed after a pop fly I smashed head-on into the post of the backboard of the basketball court next to where we were playing.

W
HEN I CAME TO
, I was lying on a bench under an arbor, it was late in the day, and the first things I noticed were the wet-and-dry smell of water that had been sprinkled over the baked earth and the musk of my brand-new leather glove, which they’d put under my head for a pillow. Then there was this dull pain in my temple. I guess I must have said something. I don’t really remember. Only later did a buddy of mine who’d been looking after me get around to telling. That what I apparently said was,
That’s okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it
.

Now, where did that come from? To this day, I have no idea. I guess I was dreaming, probably about lunch. But two decades later the phrase is still there, kicking around in my head.

That’s okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it
.

With these words, I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place—death. Imagining death is, at least for me, an awfully hazy proposition. And death, for some reason, reminds me of the Chinese.

T
HERE WAS AN ELEMENTARY
school for Chinese up the hill from the harbor (forgive me, I’ve completely forgotten the name of the school, so I’ll just call it “the Chinese elementary school”), and I had to go there to take a standard aptitude test.
Out of several test locations, the Chinese elementary school was the farthest away, and I was the only one in my class assigned there. A clerical mix-up, maybe? Everybody else was sent somewhere closer.

Chinese elementary school?

I asked everyone I knew if they knew anything about this Chinese elementary school. No one knew a thing, except that it was half an hour away by train. Now, back then I didn’t do much in the way of exploring, hardly ever rode around to places by myself, so for me this might as well have been the end of the earth.

The Chinese elementary school at the edge of the world.

S
UNDAY MORNING
two weeks later found me in a dark funk as I sharpened a dozen pencils, then packed my lunch and classroom slippers into my plastic schoolbag, as prescribed. It was a sunny day, maybe a little too warm for autumn, but my mother made me wear a sweater anyway. I boarded the train all by myself and stood by the door the whole way, looking out the window. I didn’t want to miss the stop.

I spotted the Chinese elementary school even without looking at the map printed on the back of the registration form. All I had to do was follow a flock of kids with slippers and lunch boxes stuffed into their schoolbags. There were tens, maybe hundreds, of kids filing up the steep grade. A pretty remarkable sight. No one was kicking a ball, no one was pulling at a younger kid’s cap; everyone was just walking quietly. Like a demonstration of indeterminate perpetual motion. Climbing the hill, I started sweating under my heavy sweater.

C
ONTRARY TO WHATEVER
vague expectations I may have had, the Chinese elementary school did not look much different from my own school. In fact, it was cleaner. The long, dark corridors, the musty air…. All the images that had filled my head for two weeks proved totally unfounded. Passing through the fancy iron gates, I followed the gentle arc of a stone
path between plantings to the main entrance, where a clear pond sparkled in the 9:00
A.M.
sun. Along the facade stood a row of trees, each with a plaque identifying the tree in Chinese. Some characters I could read, some I couldn’t. The entrance opened onto an enclosed courtyard, in the corners of which were a bronze bust of somebody, a small white rain gage, and an exercise bar.

I removed my shoes at the entrance as instructed, then went to the classroom assigned to me. It was bright, with forty fold-top desks neatly arranged in rows, each place affixed with a registration tag. My seat was in the very front row by the window; I guess I had the lowest number.

The blackboard was a pristine deep green; the teacher’s place was set with a box of chalk and a vase bearing a single white chrysanthemum. Everything was spotless, a flawless picture of order. There were no drawings or compositions tacked up willy-nilly on the bulletin board. Maybe they’d been taken down so as not to distract us during the test. I took my seat, set out my pencil case and writing pad, propped up my chin, and closed my eyes.

It was nearly fifteen minutes later when the proctor of the test came in, carrying the stack of exams under his arm. He didn’t look anything over forty, but he walked with a cane and dragged his left foot in a slight limp. The cane was made of cherry wood, sort of crudely, the kind of thing they sell as souvenirs at the summit of a hiking trail. The proctor’s limp was unaffected, so you noticed the cheap cane more. Forty pairs of eyes focused on this guy, or, rather, on the exams, and all was resounding silence.

The proctor mounted the stand in front of the class, placed the exams on his desk, then plunked his cane down on the side. He checked that all the seats were filled, coughed, and glanced at his watch. Then, clamping both hands on the edges of the desk as if to hold himself down, he lifted his gaze straight to a corner of the ceiling.

Silence.

Fifteen seconds and not a sound. The kids all tensed and held their breath, staring at the stack of exams; the lame-legged proctor stared at the ceiling. He was wearing a light-gray suit with a white shirt and a tie of eminently forgettable color and pattern. He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, very deliberately, and put them back on.

“I shall be acting as your test proctor,” the man finally spoke.
Shall
. “As soon as you receive your exam booklet, place it facedown on your desk. Do not turn it over. Keep both hands flat on your lap. When I say ‘Begin,’ you may turn it faceup and begin. When there are ten minutes remaining before the end of the test period, I shall say to you, ‘Ten minutes left.’ At that time, check your work to see that you have not made any minor errors. When I say ‘Stop,’ that is the end of the test period. Turn your examination booklet facedown and place your hands on your lap. Is that understood?”

Silence.

He looked at his watch again.

“Well, as I see that we have ten minutes before the beginning of the test, I’d like to have a little talk with you. Please relax.”

Phew, phew
. There were several sighs.

“I am Chinese and I teach at this school.”

M
Y FIRST CHINESE!

He didn’t
look
Chinese. But what did I expect? What was a Chinese supposed to look like?

“In this classroom,” he continued, “Chinese students the same age as yourselves all study as hard as you do…. Now, as you all know, China and Japan are neighboring countries. In order for everyone to enjoy happy lives, neighbors must make friends. Isn’t that right?”

Silence.

“Of course, some things about our two countries are very similar and some things are very different. Some things we
understand about each other and some things we do not. But isn’t that the same with you and your friends? Even if they are your friends, some things they cannot understand. But if you make an effort, you can still become close. That is what I believe. But in order to do that, we must begin with respect for each other…. That is the first step.”

Silence.

“For instance. Suppose many, many Chinese children went to your school to take a test. Just as you yourselves are doing now, sitting at Chinese children’s desks. Think about this, please.”

Hmm.

“Suppose that on Monday morning, all of you go back to your school.
You
go to your desks. And what do you see? You see that there are doodles and marks all over your desks, chewing gum stuck under the seat, one of your classroom slippers is missing. How would you feel?”

Silence.

“For instance, you,” he said, turning to point right at me, me with the lowest registration number, “would you be happy?”

Everyone looked at me.

I blushed bright red and shook my head.

“So you see,” he said, turning back to the class again, as everyone’s eyes shifted back to the front of the room, “you must not mark up the desks or stick gum under the seats or go fooling around with what’s inside the desks. Is that understood?”

Silence.

“Chinese children speak up louder when they answer.”

Yes
, came forty replies. Or, rather, thirty-nine. My mouth wouldn’t open.

“Well, then, heads up, chests out.”

We looked up and swelled to attention.

“And be proud.”

•   •   •

S
OME TWENTY YEARS ON
, I’ve completely forgotten the results of the test. All I remember is the school kids walking quietly up the hill and the Chinese teacher. That, and how to hold my head up with pride.

T
HE TOWN WHERE I WENT
to high school was a port town, so there were quite a few Chinese around. Not that they seemed any different from the rest of us. Nor did they have any special traits. They were as different from each other as could be, and in that way they were the same as us. When I think about it, the curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.

There were several Chinese kids in my class. Some got good grades, others didn’t. There was the cheerful type and the dead-quiet character. One who lived in an almost palatial spread, another in a sunless one-room-kitchenette walk-up. Really, all sorts. Though I never did get especially close to any of them. I wasn’t your let’s-make-friends sort of guy. Japanese or Chinese or anything else, made no difference.

I did, however, meet up with one of them ten years later, though I probably shouldn’t get into that just yet.

Meanwhile, the scene shifts to Tokyo.