It is Just That Your House is So Far Away by Steve Noyes

Author:Steve Noyes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 97891897109-70-0
Publisher: Signature Editions
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The full force of Beijing’s winter descended on the Jian Hua campus. The fuwuyuan sat behind her desk in a duck-hunting vest. Jeff’s tires were perpetually flat. The meagre snow, filthy with coal soot, lay over the hard earth, and the trees were stark and suspended from the heavens from etiolated twigs. His gloves were useless as he rode to class. His hands ached. He required four or five dumplings in the early morning, and two glasses of hot, sweetened milk.

There they were, the Han, thought Jeff, dancing on their frozen island in the early morning, wielding swords and banners, the Han, their paper lanterns, the dead snakes at the bottom of eighty-eight-ounce demijohns of maotai, how splendid, the renewable armature of the Beijing opera performers’ poses, the deep magic and binding tremors of being Chinese. Everything frozen in the gesture of identity — manners, food, family relations, but somehow ever undulant, the stomping Reeboks underneath the rippling, rearing, many-manned dragon.

They’re just people, thought Jeff. People doing push-ups in the morning. Save your clichés for Canada.

Lighten up.

In his dormitory room, the wind infiltrated the considerable gaps between window and frame. His sheets of Chinese characters broke from their flimsy tape moorings and drifted onto the floor. The sun set shortly after four-thirty, in a chemical roar, having sucked the blasted breath out of fifteen million souls for its eerie combustive red; in its wavering depths Jeff sensed the stuck-on-one-station flicker of their infantile faith in it. He waited patiently for the hot water to come on, he marked papers, he went for short but tiring walks around campus. The workers in overalls, toothless, patrolled the lily ponds in flat-bottomed boats, breaking up the ice, and fished the stinking, black mass of lily-dreck out of the ponds; it would be recycled, plowed back into the earth. Nothing was wasted. The cabbage on the dinner plates in the shitang retained yesterday’s gloss. It was amazing what a little oil could do.

He spent a great deal of his time eating. Digesting.

Robert was not around. A couple of the other foreign experts had gone travelling. The dormitory hall floor shone like a tomb. And Tabitha was depressed.

He sat in her room and listened to her agonize about her teaching.

“I can’t seem to get them to talk.”

“It’s cultural, Tabitha. They’re not used to talking. It’s not you.”

“It’s a total failure,” she said. “I’m not a good teacher.”

“Do you go to class?”

“Yes.”

“Do you try?”

“Yes, I try. I guess.” Her eyes were red.

“Then you’re not a total failure,” he said. “Look, it’s an interaction, right?”

“I should have prepared better. I should have thought more about it before I came. I’m letting them down. I’ll never be any good.”

“You’re doing a good job,” he said.

But he felt like saying, “Everything we lao wai are doing here is a total failure, because we persist in our notion that we have something to teach. We have nothing to teach these people. Their own experience has taken them to the human depths and the human heights.

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