| Hey, Mao by Thomas Anderson |
| Tom Anderson won a fellowship
in fiction from the Massachusetts Council of The Arts. He has a book
of short stories and a novel in the agent hunt, and has edited and
co-authored a non-fiction book: Java for Business. Put me in the river and let me demonstrate my virility. Take a picture, a little bobbing head. Look at my handlers, all behind me, all diminished. I can handle the pollution, the chemicals, the microorganisms, the golden carp nibbling at my feet. I have stood in line and seen Mao’s embalmed body. I have hacked my way through smoke-filled meetings. I have slept with our new plant’s financial person, Mei Ling, one of ten people at our Chinese plant who speak fluent English. She has infected me. She’s all I can think about. This is not a love thing. The new president of my company, he lusts after her. The manufacturing vice president as well. The head of marketing, the lawyer, the chief financial officer, even our woman human resources vice president, nominally heterosexual, wants Mei Ling. The strangeness, the otherness. Pheromones, intense pheromones. Or we’re all just fucked up. My time was limited. What could I do? Move to China? Bring her back to Palo Alto? Run to Macao and open a public relations business? Reuters might have me, but I wouldn’t get paid much. There were obstacles to staying in China: visas, licenses. Maybe it was a love thing. She fucked me blind, every which way. Upside down, standing up. She had a probing tongue, soft lips. Always available. Ask and you shall receive. In the john. On the table. She fed me rhinoceros bone, ginseng, other concoctions. I was Godzilla, King Kong, Mighty Joy Young. In a dream, in a waking dream, Mao stood beside our bed. Mei Ling was asleep. I watched her breath. I watched Mao. He took off his cap and put it on the table. He opened his book. He read to me, to us, in English. Mei Ling woke in a start. She looked at Mao and her eyes opened wide. She shivered. “In three hundred and fifty years,” Mao read. “We will all be Chinese.” “Mixed. We’ll be mixed!” I argued. He shook his head. Mei Ling asked if we would have children. Mao smiled. When we had marched up the Great Wall on our second day in China there were the seven of us from the States, and Mei Ling – a Snow White situation. It was a Sunday, and the wall was packed with tourists and children and soldiers and lovers shyly touching hands. Who would notice in the crush? We moved slowly, in small steps. It was cool and gray, and there were cigarettes lit up all around us, the home grown smell of tobacco cut down in the Carolinas, rolled up, shipped over, aggressively marketed. Mei Ling was in front with me, and the others followed, watching me, the lowest man in the hierarchy, the littlest dwarf, now desired, somehow the favorite, pursued, brushed ever so often with Mei Ling’s arms, hands, breasts, legs. She’d turn and smile at the others. She’d laugh at my Chinese. At one point, looking out the rolling hills, watching for the Mongol tribes, she put her hand on the back of my neck and mussed my hair. Everyone saw this. Everyone looked away. Our new plant was for the twenty-first century - get our dibs in on the bulging Chinese economy. This was where the future was, where the bell curve on its outer edge would give you the smartest people, and the most beautiful. It was a question of size and infinity. Mei Ling was out there at the far end of the curve. At the airport, the first time I saw her, I had stopped short, lost my breath, couldn’t talk. Everything was a blur. The customs official slowly went through my bags. Mei Ling was outside the baggage area, pressed against a black chain. She held up a sign with our company logo. We had both positioned ourselves to end up in the same car together and we sat next to each other, our legs pressed close. “You’re thin for a Westerner,” she commented. Later, at dinner, she passed the platters of food to me first, and kept my wine glass filled, and put her hand on my thigh, and, for all, lifted her feet up and showed off her tall shoes, from Japan, a rage. Everyone stared, shoes and legs and up her leather skirt. There was a toast for the shoes, which she lifted up again. We all drank too much and no one wanted to leave Mei Ling and we closed the restaurant and went to the president’s suite and continued drinking. CNN flickered in the background. There was music from a small radio and Mei Ling, shoeless, hair whipping about, danced with each of us alone and all of us together. The marketing VP eventually passed out. The human resources person groaned on the bathroom floor, her cheek on the cool tile. Mei Ling quietly left and when we realized that she was gone we all went to our own rooms and each of us dreamed of her, of her there with us alone, what we’d do, what it would be like, and, dreamlike, there was a knock at the door, and a finger on Mei Ling’s lips, her shoes in her hands, and quietly we went down the dark corridor, and down the dark steps, out of the hotel, into a taxi, across Beijing, to a house-crowded street, and a door that slapped shut. As we lay in her bed that first night Mei Ling traced Chinese characters on my back. She’d trace and she’d laugh and her laugh would make me laugh and the laughter would bubble through the thin walls to the family in the apartment beside her, all seven of them, over the maximum in children with five, over the recommended, over to the point where they were shunned, impoverished, unemployed and unemployable. “They had my children,” Mei Ling complained, but she was relieved. She was free, done, unencumbered, and could work like a maniac, the same as an American in Sunnyvale or Mountain View or Los Altos, pager beeping incessantly, new blurbs on the pager, always informed and alert and relevant. The chairman had a pager. The human resources person had one. All seven of us had one. “I think too many Chinese people think that their culture is superior to the Western culture,” Mei Ling had said. “You think?” “Yes. But jealousy’s behind it, and fear.” I put my hand on the small of her back. “You’re not jealous,” I asserted. “Are you afraid?” “Trembling,” she laughed. She turned her head away. “It’s a racial thing, too. We’re purer and smarter and more family oriented. You are just lucky with all your things.” “We do have things,” I agreed. She turned on her side and faced me. My hand was on her hip. “I like things,” she said. “I like working for an American company.” What was odd was that our pagers automatically displayed the news in Chinese characters while we were in China. The news and messages would beam up from anywhere in the world and plop down on the pagers, in Chinese, leaving all of us shaking our heads, out of the loop. There was hell to pay, I knew there would be hell to pay. It was the human resources person, of course. We were both adults and both free, she said, Mei Ling and I, but we had crossed a line. What we did on our own time was our own business, but this was too public. How stupid could we be, could I be? Just a few years ago, Mei Ling would have been jailed, the human resources person said, exiled. I would have been jailed. In the States she could sue my ass off. Mei ling walked into the room. The human resources person sighed. Her pupils dilated. Mei Ling joined us at the breakfast table, and the other people from my company straggled in. We did a little Red Guard thing: everyone told me how I had screwed up. We should have had arranged more coverage of the upcoming plant opening. Where was the Asian Wall Street Journal? Where was CNN? The projection system wasn’t compatible. We should have brought gifts for the employees. The logo on the building was wrong. It was a public confession of my work sins by others. No one mentioned my liaison with Mei Ling directly, it was everything else. Sins were piled on the barricades. Shots were fired; smoke filled the air. Mao was the headwaiter. Mao smirked. Mao wore a gas mask. Mao held up handfuls of condoms. At the Heavenly Palace in the middle of Beijing it was quiet and still despite the crowds of people milling about. Mei Ling kissed me in the corridor leading to the rest rooms. She put her hands down my pants. It wasn’t something she would normally do in public, I assumed, but it was right and just then. I was leaving China in two days. I was losing my job, and she was the cause. No Mei Ling and I’d be buzzing about until the next Company Cultural Revolution. No Mei Ling and they’d delay the dunce cap and the dancing about, delay the expulsion and cabbage picking. Do you make a wish in a pagan temple the first time you go in? It works in a Catholic Church, at least in California. But this was a temple, a palace for the emperor-gods, a Kubla Khan creation, possibly. I wished. I wished. Mei Ling kissed my mouth and grabbed harder. She pulled me into the woman’s room, and then into a stall. There were lines of women exiting and entering the stalls on either side of us. The rest of my colleagues were outside the building, looking around, thinking they’d lost us or we’d gone back or were hiding. “He has a prick for brains,” I heard the human resources woman say. “He has to mature,” the president offered. “Prick for brains,” the human resources person reiterated. I shook my head. Who’s to judge? Mei Ling was happy and different and had a high libido. She wished she were an American at times, she’d told me, a rock star, a celebrity, an Internet mogul, a hippie at Woodstock dancing naked in the mud. She was a born rebel, she claimed. It was in her genes. Her grandfather and grandmother had been Catholics in China before the revolution, and then they recanted, and then they joined the Party and were strict and tight and controlling. Mao freaks. Cultists. Puritans. On shelves around their apartment they had the Little Red Book in dozens of languages: Serbian, Japanese, Basque, Swedish, Fijian. “I’ve read Hawthorne,” Mei Ling announced. “I wear the red letter! M. Mao! Mei Ling!” She laughed. “I’m little Pearl,” she said. “No, Hester, Hester Ling.” I tugged at her pants. “You’ll go to hell!” she whispered. She was wet. “Hell, hell, hell,” she laughed. We bumped against the wall, which shook. “I’m a witch,” she said. I grunted, gasped, sighed. She was witch-filled, a Hester, a Pearl, culturally complete, well-read, filled with numbers and Abercrombie & Fitch clothes, best of East and West, granddaughter of victims and traitors and faith-losers, fluent in six languages, promiscuous, fickle. Put a Dutchman in my situation in the next month and she’d be with him. She’d be dancing in wooden clogs. She’d wave her arms like windmills. She’d press her breasts against the dike. Hopeless. The sea was inevitable, and it would fill the fields and drown the crops and salt the wells. At the formal dedication ceremonies at the plant all eyes were on Mei Ling. It was as if the factory were built for her, and we had come over for her, and the city and national officials had come for her, and the putative customers had come for her, and the workers had come for her, and we looked at her and worshiped her and her numbers and her presentations. The world had formed around her, and the sun shone down on her. She had one Chinese boyfriend once, she had confessed. She once had a Brazilian boyfriend. She had slept with a woman from Kazakhstan. The Brazilian boyfriend she had met at bank, she’d told me. He was an intern at this bank, and they had posted him to China. He hated it; hated the people; hated the food. They danced, she told me. They slept together. He taught her finance. She was at first shy about telling me about the woman from Kazakhstan, but she finally did, more than I wanted to hear. But she said she loved me. She said I understood China. She said I was different. She sounded sincere, although the Dutchman a month later would be different as well. But at the ceremony she was pure and unassailable. The human resources vice president maneuvered me away from her into the back of the room. The dignitaries smoked and created a cloud of smoke. The plant manager gave everyone red kerchiefs as gifts. Mei Ling put one kerchief around her neck and one around each arm. She radiated. There were long interminable translations and I could only look at Mei Ling. I could only think of her: Mei Ling in the Heavenly Palace. Mei Ling in her thin-walled apartment. Mei Ling the windmill, the mill grinding away. Mei Ling on the Great Wall. Mei Ling young, Mei Ling old, with boyfriend, without boyfriend. Mei Ling in her mathematics class in a stiff student uniform with a red tie. Mei Ling on her computer. Mei Ling with her spreadsheets and Net Present Values. Her thinking, I wondered what she was thinking, right then, at that moment, our Company president all puffed up, the Mayor of the City all puffed up, the government security men in their dark sunglasses, stern-faced, muscle-bound. She turned her head and smiled and a wave of joy swept through the crowd. It pushed me back, literally. Everyone stepped back. Mao said she was fickle, it was her nature. It was our last night together, and Mao had reappeared. Mao was in the window. He was in the mirror. He was behind the old tub. He jerked his head back and mimicked my pose, head pillowed against the hard porcelain, arms on either side of the tub. Mei Ling sat between my legs and rested her head on my chest. Mei Ling stroked my arm. “If you go to another company to work you can come to China and we can see each other,” she said. “Screw the human resources woman.” “She might go after you next.” Mei Ling punched the water. “I’d crush her!” She kicked her foot. “I’d knock her stomach out!” Mao told me I could join him in a month, I could come back and haunt Mei Ling. I could stand by the tub, as he did, and watch, and advise. I could hold a book, as he did, a prop, a reference. Back home the stories would fly; sex, beauty, jealousy, power. He was found out. He was naïve. Did you see her photo. She’s bi-sexual. She’s brilliant. Fire them both. But Mei Ling would be all right, they needed her. There were other Company stories of sudden lust and subsequent firings or leavings. One high intensity computer person went to an outside training meeting and fell in love with the trainer and fled job, home, family with the trainer. There was a top woman marketing executive who ran off with a much younger and stupider telephone sales person. Fired by voice mail. She never came back for her last expense check or desk mementos. Me? Now I was one of them, folklore, corporately dead. Beauty kissed me and I went down. There were bushels of poisoned apples and witches in disguises. The dwarfs were fierce and anxious to find fault. I fell into their hands. I turned around and Mei Ling washed my back. She gently kissed my ear. The plant buzzed with real work the day after the dedication ceremony, everyone all good-spirited and diligent. Products were popping off the line, boxed up, labeled for shipment. There were meetings on meetings, and people smoked. I drank coffee, and Mei Ling drifted away. She was at her desk. Then she was buttonholed with the human resources vice president. Then she was speaking in machine gun rhythms to the plant manager. Then she was on the phone. She hugged each of us in turn as we were leaving the building, myself no tighter than any of the others, as if the six days we’d had was lost, a little illusory pleasure-dome. A defensive move, perhaps, on her part. A way to heal. Protecting her little shit job. I was shunned by my colleagues, which told me the fantasy was true. I longed for the long flight, and a long sleep, and prayed for forgetfulness on everyone’s part. I sat away from the others, and they gossiped quietly as new passengers fumbled about, opening overhead bins, begging for pillows. When they would ask me, in an interview, why I was leaving my current company, what could I say? Forced out? Strategic differences? They wanted their own team? I fucked the new Chinese plant’s finance person. – it would be a recruiter’s dream. I should have gone to Macao. I should have at least asked. Mei Ling’s flaws I wanted to post up on the Internet: inconstant, promiscuous, deceptive. Her last embrace was cold, heartless. I had squeezed. She had froze. I had tried to kiss her and her face went still. Nothing. Hugging stones. Mao appeared in the window of the plane. Mao was in the little video screen in front of me. Mao’s picture was in the flight magazine. Mao whispered through the earphones, on channel twelve, in English. He said that capitalism changes people. He said he hated his body on display. He apologized for any harm he had done. He bragged about all the women he had had. He took me, in spirit, through the plane. The old tourists heading home. The Chinese students on visas planning to visit and stay and never return. The group of German students who couldn’t wait to sleep with each other again. My president and the vice president of human resources discussing how disgusted they were with me. The California businessman in the front seat with a billion-dollar computer deal. The pilots edgy, nervous, hating this airport, wanting to blow out of there as quickly as possible. We flew by osmosis, Mao and me, out of the plane and through the airport, back through the city and the industrial park, back to our new manufacturing plant. There we filtered about, through the walls and offices, through people’s heads, their secret thoughts piling up, Mao writing it all down, nodding knowingly to me. My image was in Mei Ling’s head. There was an image of my genitals as well; shocking from this perspective. There were other lovers there, and crassness, and lines of Shakespeare and Hawthorne, and stupidly wrong ideas about computer operating systems and California and the way things worked at home. But she had her spreadsheets down perfect. They formed patterns in her head. Numbers and characters and formulas and histograms. She fantasized visiting the Company in the States. She dreamed they’d give her a job there. She’d be challenged, inspired. She’d make a good life. She could eventually run the place, she imagined. Mao took me out to the streets, and we saw the Dutchman coming, the one who would replace me. He was a kind man, and believed in everything he did, and suspected nothing of what was inevitably to come.
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