Year of the Tiger

I see his face. Pale. Scared.

‘You okay?’ I ask.

His eyes dart around like he’s being buzzed by gnats and can’t figure out where they’re coming from. He shakes his head, fractionally.

‘You wanna go downstairs, get a cup of coffee?’

He nods.

There’s this DVD store/coffeehouse in the collection of shops that make up the ground floor of the buildings facing Wudaokou Dajie. The coffee isn’t great, but it doesn’t totally suck either. I go there sometimes when there are no beans in the house.

Chuckie and I grab our coffees at the orange countertop and sit at a little round table by the window with a scenic view of the parking lot and the lovely four-lane thoroughfare that is Wudaokou. Taxis and private cars whiz by while knots of pedestrians make their way across the street like avatars in some Nintendo game, risking all to gain the treasure on the other side.

Chuckie rips open two packs of sugar and dumps them in his coffee.

‘So, what happened?’ I finally ask. ‘You get busted at the Matrix, or what?’

‘Or what,’ Chuckie says eventually.

I’m confused by this until I realize that he’s attempting to play with the language. ‘You got busted by somebody else?’

Chuckie doesn’t exactly nod. He stirs his coffee, catching sugar grit between the spoon and the side of the ceramic cup.

‘I am going to go home for a while,’ he says, not looking at me. ‘You should not stay here.’

It’s not his fault; I know it isn’t, but I’m still so angry it’s hard for me to speak. ‘Is this about Lao Zhang, Chuckie? Is it? ’Cause I haven’t done anything wrong. You know that.’

‘Meiguanxi.’ Doesn’t matter.

Neither of us says anything for a while. I stare out the window. Amid the taxis and cars and buses, a donkey cart piled high with bricks makes its way down the street, pausing for a minute so the donkey can crap in the gutter. The guy driving it, a peasant in patched clothes and a battered Mao cap, talks on his cell phone.

Huh. I thought Beijing outlawed donkey carts.

‘They want me to tell them everything about you,’ Chuckie says rapidly. ‘They want to know who your friends are, what you do, where you go. I tell them you, me, we just, we just …’ He trails off. His hands are shaking. ‘We just living, that’s all. Just living.’

Them.

‘Foreigners, in suits?’

‘Foreigners? Why should I worry about foreigners?’ he asks, regaining some of his typical bravado. ‘What can foreigners do to me?’

‘Nothing, I guess,’ I say, hoping this isn’t going to lead into one of Chuckie’s rants about China’s Hundred Years of Humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists.

If it wasn’t the Suits, who was it?

‘This is China. Chinese people have stood up!’

‘So they were Chinese?’

‘Of course they were Chinese!’

Just like that, he deflates. When it comes down to it, Chuckie’s too much of a fuckup free spirit to make a good foaming-at-the-mouth fenqing.

‘Police, they say,’ he whispers. ‘But no IDs.’

He gets out a couple wrinkled ten-yuan notes and tosses them on the table. ‘My train leaves from West Train station in a couple hours. I better go.’ He looks away. ‘You should be careful, Ellie,’ he says. ‘You should not stay here.’

And that’s our big good-bye. I sit. Drink my coffee. Watch the passing scene outside the window. Wonder what the fuck I’m going to do now.

There’s a surveillance camera in the ceiling above the DVDs, one of those domed things that you see everywhere you go these days. Not just in China, in the U.S. too. For security, right?

I stare at the thing, at its unblinking black eye. Wonder who’s at the other end staring back.

They’re making tapes, I tell myself, to catch shoplifters. It’s not like there’s somebody watching me right now. Is there?

I pay for the coffee and head back upstairs.

Chuckie hasn’t taken a lot with him. The guitar amp, computer parts, books, and Yao Ming stand-up still clutter the living room.

I go into my little room. Stare at my narrow futon. Think I don’t ever want to sleep there again. Like I ever could sleep there without thinking of John, of lying there waiting for him to do whatever he wanted to do.

All of a sudden, I really want to pack up my stuff and get out of here.

I think about the logistics of this. I’ve got some clothes. A couple cheap pieces of furniture. My laptop. I mean, what the fuck do I have, anyway?

I open up the little cupboard by my bed. That’s where I keep my souvenirs. Things I thought I cared about.

Here’s a little Beanie Baby. A neon orange-and-red squid. I always loved that stupid squid. It’s just so funny. It makes me smile when I look at it. I throw it onto a pile of clothes to pack.

There’s a little jewelry box from Trey. I don’t have to open it; I know what’s inside: a gold cross necklace studded with tiny diamonds. He gave it to me a long time ago, right after we were married. I don’t wear it any more. I wonder why I’ve kept it.

I take the rest of the stuff out of the cupboard and dump it on the bed. A funny figurine Lao Zhang gave me, Mao as Buddha. A pennant from some soccer – oh, excuse me – football club called Arsenal from British John.

And here is that flat, hard box covered with dark blue flocking, about the size of a thin paperback. My service ribbons. My Purple Heart. I think: why did I bring this with me all the way to China? I don’t even want to open it. Why does it mean anything at all?

I throw it on top of the clothes. Because I still can’t bring myself to leave it behind.

I walk out of Chuckie’s place with a duffel bag and a backpack. That’s it.

By now, it’s close to five o’clock. I’m supposed to start work at Says Hu in an hour. I stand at the curb for a while, watching the cars and the buses and the people passing by me in this blur of noise – shouting in Chinese, horns going off, phones with their stupid ringtones, a loudspeaker blasting bad Hong Kong pop – and I think: I just want to be someplace quiet for once.

But for now? I might as well go to work.

I spring for a cab to take me the couple of miles to Says Hu, thinking I’ll get there early and have a beer.

The minute I walk inside, I can see that’s not how things are going to go.

British John is trying to pick a table up off the ground. It’s tilted on its side, one leg buckled under like it took a cheap cut block. A broken chair leans against the wall, beneath a dartboard.