Chapter 16: Endless Summer
Chapter 16: Endless Summer
After marching in the Fourth of July parade with the Wilson High School band, I flew to China with Lars’s dad. The weeks of summer leading up to Independence day I had spent in classes at Wilson, starting the morning in a computer literacy class where we learned the basics of Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, and some light video editing, then spending the rest of the day in band class. On the surface, high school band felt disciplined and orderly, a world away from the chaos of middle school band, with its screaming preteens and careless cruelty. But only on the surface. That session of summer school only lasted a month, ending around July, after which Lars’ dad chaperoned me on the plane to China. He took me as far as my grandma’s home in Nanjing before continuing on by himself to Yangzhou.
Like every summer China trip, I woke up very early the first morning, unable to fall back asleep. My grandmother’s home was an apartment in the Gulou District on Beijing West Road, part of Nanjing University’s faculty housing: New Village No. 2. The name sounded odd at first, but it would become an address my father made me memorize. “New Village Number Two, Beijing West Road, across from the university’s north gate,” he told me to repeat in case I ever got lost. Over the years, my family would simply call it Village No. 2.
Not wanting to wake all of the adults, I lay on the couch in the living room, flipping through a stack of DVDs underneath the TV, spending the early hours watching Kill Bill Vol 1 before Lars’ dad woke up and asked me if I was too young to be watching something so violent. He rubbed his eyes and yawned as the blue light of dawn became gold and woke with the calls of the cicadas in the trees. I was fourteen, and it was the summer of 2004.
That summer, my dad hired a college aged girl named Wei Wei to take care of me, since even though he was in Nanjing, he worked long hours and often needed to travel. She stayed in the other room in my grandma’s house. I would only spend about 5 or 7 weeks with her but to me, the vacation felt endless, the kind of joy you would think lasts forever.
For a few weeks, in the mornings I took badminton class at the Nanjing National Exercise Center on Zhongshan road. For breakfast I would often have shumai from a street vendor outside of grandma’s house in the alley, buying them from an elderly man with a toothy grin who handed them to me through clouds of steam for five yuan. My dad would later tell me that he had often bought food from this old man when he was younger, just as my grandfather had. Sometimes I would stop by the tiny Suguo convenience store across the alleyway for iced coffee or the giant steam buns they sold behind the counter before my dad drove me and Wei Wei to the sports center for my class. It was a freedom I have never felt.
The sports center in Nanjing was a giant building with a two story tall glass entrance held up with four huge columns. Past the automatic doors, the lobby was framed with escalators, pictures of famous Chinese athletes lining the walls. It felt nothing like the old stadium by Waipo’s house in Taizhou. The badminton courts were on the third floor, a stunningly open space filled with natural light, ceilings up so high that the giant industrial lights felt tiny. The walls were lined with blue drapes that caught the sounds of play and laughter in the hall filled with noises of squeaking shoes.
I spent the mornings practicing the same movements with a racket over and over again, lining up with other children, a coach feeding me birdies to hit. During breaks I would play with the other students, sometimes horsing around and pulling pranks. One day I got in trouble when I taught the other boys to press the feathers of a birdie inward so that it would fly further; we were trying to see who could hit them up to the rafters. As I was made to stand at the other side of the court with new friends as punishment, we looked at each other and made faces while trying not to laugh. It was the first time I discovered getting into trouble could also be fun.
In China, I made friends easily. I didn’t feel the need to pretend to be someone else. In America, for some reason, I never said how I truly felt. I spoke obnoxiously instead, mimicking the way other children talked, exaggerating their jokes in an effort to blend in. Maybe I believed that if I became someone else, no one could hate my true self. In Nanjing, I wasn’t trying to fit in. I simply belonged, without knowing why.
Some days my dad picked me up after class for a quick lunch. Other days he dropped Wei Wei off, and I spent the rest of the day with her. Sometimes she took me down to the lower levels of the sports center, where there was an ice rink. We skated for an hour, weaving in and out of families, clusters of shrieking children, and practicing athletes while Mandopop blared over the PA. The cold air smelled faintly of metal and sugar, little flakes of ice and dust hanging in the air and settling in my hair. Sometimes I would pause, unsure what month it was, looking down at my T-shirt and shorts beneath the fog of my own breath.
The days when my dad was busy, that I spent with Wei Wei were among my favorite days. For someone who remembers everything, that summer felt strangely out of focus. Perhaps it was because for the first time in my life I wasn’t observing. I was simply living. The memories come back not only as scenes, but as heat, laughter, the smell of warm summer rain, the sounds of cicadas in the sunset. Perhaps clarity had been a symptom of suffering, and blur the proof of peace.
We’d often get up in the mornings after sleeping in and have a late breakfast at a place called “Lion Bridge” on Hunan road where all the best foodie spots were. Some days the breakfasts were soup bao, hot and filled with crab roe. Other days we’d have noodles that I would down with Coke or the limited edition peppermint flavored Sprite that was available that summer. Lion Bridge was a walking street closed to vehicles, lined with not only restaurants but also pop up vendors, some selling snacks like tanghulu, a delicacy of berries on a stick dipped in syrup. Sometimes vendors that sold toys would pop up as well, one setting up a small photobooth that Wei Wei and I took many pictures in, printing them out as little strips and stickers. At the end of the street was a “Light Art Tunnel”, a huge, long archway covering two blocks that lit up with LEDs and animations underneath its canopy at night.
One time after we spent the day hiking around Sun Yat Sen Park, it started raining, a light sprinkle that became a deluge splattering the gray marble tiles of Lion Bridge after we returned. As we took refuge under a nearby awning, Wei Wei suddenly remembered the blankets she hung out to dry that morning. “My laundry!”, she wailed comically, raising her head to the sky as passersby stared and I yelled with her, not wanting to be left out.
We would often come back to Hunan road for dinner after our daily outings. My favorite dinner spot that I would ask Wei Wei to take me to often was a place called “Hot Wind Aloha”, that served an inexplicable combination of Chinese styled Hawaiian themed Italian food. We would often split a plate of spaghetti bolognese and a pineapple pizza served still sizzling in a pan. It was my first time having spaghetti outside of Patrick’s home or school. In fact, it was my first time eating at an Italian restaurant.
Faye would sometimes get dropped off by her mom at my grandma’s house that summer, and we would spend mornings watching tv waiting for Wei Wei to wake up. One morning after the two of us had finished watching all the Adam Sandler movies in my bootleg DVD collection, we both snuck into Wei Wei’s room, hopping on her bed bugging her to take us to a nearby water park called Sun Palace.
Many afternoons when the rain came down too hard, I followed Wei Wei to the underground mall near Xinjiekou, our wet shoes squeaking across tiles so glossy you could see your reflection staring back, an upside-down world of its own. We’d eat lunch at a nearby teashop called Daffodil-Daffodil that somehow served sizzling steak and pasta plate meals along with its tea sets. I would often order that same dish when I went with Wei Wei to the internet cafes she frequented. There, we’d rent out two computers side by side and eat junk food while surfing the web for hours. While Wei Wei logged into QQ and flirted with boys, I streamed videos, marveling at the internet speed; at home in 2004 it was never fast enough to play anything. I would often play a game called Paopaotang, which was pretty much Bomberman if you replaced the robots with little kids in bear costumes and the bombs with water balloons. I can still hear its bright, bubbly jingle even now.
This was the first China I knew on my own, without my parents or grandparents, a version that accepted me without question. It became a refuge I would keep returning to, even years later during college.
Dad took me to Beijing for a few days near the end of summer, visiting all of the tourist spots such as the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Yuanmingyuan, the ruins of a former summer palace converted to a park with lakes and waterways lined with green willows and grassy slopes. There I spent an entire day with my dad, walking along the picturesque corridors and strolling past elderly locals practicing taichi or playing mahjong. From a souvenir stand we purchased a beautiful brass Chinese chess set with glass pieces. I would later spend hours playing chess with my grandfather on that set, hoping, in the later years, that he could still remember.
One night as we were eating dumplings at a small shop near our hotel, I noticed a five year old boy playing with a gameboy and his single dad, smoking a cigarette as the little boy seemed to cough a little, and I felt bad for him. Somehow I felt less inhibited here than back home because before my dad could stop me, I went up to the man and said, “Sir, I think that’s really bad for your son.”
He looked at me for a long second, then at my dad, who was caught off guard and just shrugged. The man looked back at me, nodded once, and said, “You know what, you’re absolutely right. I didn’t think of that.” Then he put out his cigarette. His son kept playing.
That trip, dad’s company paid for a luxury hotel where everything was glittering and new. The artfully sculpted sandstone patterned lights overhead made pretty reflections off of the granite topped reception desk, and in the mornings we ate breakfast on a lounge area behind a faux bamboo lattice partition. It felt like a version of China recreated in make-believe fantasy as if we were living in a movie, so far removed from the “old country” I grew up imagining in America. Yet something in it felt missing, something I couldn’t see without my Waipo or my grandma.
Despite this, I realized I liked this version of me that I found in Nanjing, my grandfather’s city, between the walking streets, the lake, the internet cafes and the night markets. He was free, unfiltered. He made friends comfortably and effortlessly, saying what was on his mind. But I wouldn’t see this version of myself again for another decade.
After going home, I stuck the small sticker with the pictures Wei Wei and I took from the photobooth onto my cell phone. I would treasure that phone because the sticker reminded me of that summer, even though I had no one to call on it besides my parents. I don’t remember when it happened, but eventually, the sticker fell off.