China Mountain Zhang Read Free Page A

straighten up, I just don’t get around to it for weeks on end.
    At six I present myself at apartment sixteen, in a complex on Bay Shore. I am carrying a carefully wrapped copy of Sun-zi’s classic on strategy. Not that I think Foreman Qian is such a fan of military strategy but because I think he will be flattered by the insinuation he reads the classics.
    Foreman Qian’s daughter answers the door, “You are Engineer Zhang?” she says. “I am Qian San-xiang.”

    She is astonishingly ugly. More than ugly, there is something wrong with the bones of her face.
    She is a flat-faced southern-looking Chinese girl of twenty or twenty-two. She has a little square face like a monkey and small eyes even by Chinese standards. Her little wizened face is so unexpected I blink. I think instantly of some sort of bone defect that would create that almost nonexistent chin. She looks at me expressionlessly and then drops her eyes and glances sideways at her mother. Her mother is a matronly-looking woman clasping her hands together and smiling at me; Foreman Qian comes into the doorway to the little foyer and says hello and there we all are, four of us crowded into this little space. San-xiang slides between her mother and father and disappears into the next room.
    “Let me take your jacket,” her mother says. “I am Liu Su-ping.” Chinese women do not take their husband’s names, and it is evident that I have left the West in the hall.
    I shrug out of my jacket and casually leave my package on the little table by the door. As a polite person I do not call attention to the gift; as polite people the Qians pretend not to have noticed it. We go into the living room, full of heavy wooden furniture clearly brought over from China. The elaborately paned window faces the harbor. The apartment is pretty but extraordinarily cramped. I sit and am offered something to drink, which I decline.
    “No, please have something,” Liu Su-ping insists. She has small soft-looking hands which she keeps clasped tightly together. I decline respectfully. Am I certain I would not like some tea? “San-xiang,” she calls, “bring Engineer Zhang some tea.”
    “No, do not bother yourself,” I say. I am not an engineer, I’m an engineering tech. A technician. Two-year degree, not four. I hate when people call me an engineer.
    “It is sent by my sister, Dragon Well tea, from Huangzhou,” she says.
    Having politely declined three times I can now say yes, I would be pleased to have some tea. It is always easier to let people give
you something than to convince them that you are not being polite, that you really just don’t want it.
    Now, however, while San-xiang makes tea, silence falls.
    “So,” I say in Mandarin, “I have always meant to ask you, Foreman Qian, where is your family from?” There is a little burst of conversation. His family is from Chengde, in the west. Her family is from Wenzhou, in the south. They met when he was on a two-year assignment in her province. Where is my family from?
    I can only say I don’t know. Elder Zhang was born and raised in the States. I have a grandfather on the West Coast but I haven’t seen him in twenty years. And there is no need to discuss my mother so I don’t mention her.
    “You speak Mandarin very well,” Liu Su-ping says. “Where did you learn it?”
    “I went to the Brooklyn Middle School of Theory and History and all of our classes were in Mandarin,” I say, “but I am afraid I was not so quick as my classmates. My Mandarin is very poor.”
    Oh no, oh no, they say, it is very good, very smooth. Oh no, I say, they flatter me.
    We lapse into silence. My only consolation is that I must not be making a good impression.
    San-xiang brings in tea on a tray. The tea is served out of a pretty porcelain tea pot. It is nice tea, smoky and strong. I say so.
    San-xiang serves tea and sits down, eyes on her lap. She is dressed nicely but more casually than I expected. Foreman Qian is in tailored