China Mountain Zhang Read Online Free

suddenly she says in English, “I want to tell you I’m very sorry about this.”
    “Nothing to be sorry about,” I say brightly.

    She glances up at me, that same sidelong glance she gives her mother. “I know you didn’t plan to spend your Saturday night dragging me to the kite races. I know you are doing this because of my dad. You probably have a girlfriend.” The last with such bitterness I am taken aback, even as I find myself thinking her English is good.
    “No,” I answer honestly, “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
    “Look, we’ll go to the kite races for awhile, then I’ll take a cab home and you can do whatever you want to do.”
    The world is unnaturally cruel to ugly girls. “Why don’t we just go to the kite races and not worry about it,” I say. “Have you ever been?”
    “No, I’ve only seen them on the vid.”
    “Well, they’re better when you’re there.”
    I pay her way into the subway and we head for Manhattan and get off at Union Square. We don’t talk on the subway but then the subway is loud. At Union Square we head for the Huang Tunnel pedestrian walkway and come up in Washington Square Park, where the race begins and ends. Washington Square is packed on Saturday night. I buy us a ticket for the stands because I’d much prefer to jack in. “Would you like something to drink? A beer?” I ask.
    She shakes her head.
    “Don’t be polite,” I say, smiling, “I’m a New Yorker. I’m going to have a beer. Did you eat dinner?” She lets me buy her a beer and I get a bag of finger dumplings and find our seats. I even buy two programs, although usually I just use the board.
    We sit down, she holding her beer carefully. I watch for awhile but she doesn’t drink. Maybe she doesn’t like beer.
    “How old were you when you came to New York?” I ask.
    “Nine,” she says.
    “Do you like it?”
    “I hated it at first, but I guess it’s all right.” She shrugs. “Places are pretty much the same, underneath.”

    “Do you think?” I ask. “I’ve never been anywhere but New York, except once when I was six and we went to San Diego to see my grandparents. It seemed different.”
    “Things are different from place to place,” she says. “New York is really very different from China, not as—” She pauses, diplomatically searching for the word.
    “We’re backward,” I supply, grinning.
    “Not backward,” she says. “Things are less advanced, maybe. I used to think I was unhappy because my father was in trouble and we had to come here, but now I don’t think it makes any difference. If you’re a certain kind of person, you’ll be unhappy wherever you are.”
    I have no doubt she considers herself that certain kind of person.
    “Are you happy?” she asks.
    “Do you mean at this moment, or with my life?”
    “With your life. Answer the first thing you think.”
    “No,” I say.
    “Do you think you would be happy in China?”
    “I don’t know,” I say, “I’ve never been to China.”
    “Do you want to go?”
    I wonder if she is playing a game. Does she know that her father has dangled China in front of me as her dowry? “Sure,” I make it sound as nonchalant as I can, “I wouldn’t mind going to China. I’d like to see China.”
    “Would you like to live there?”
    “Go to school there? Live there forever?” In China deviance is a capital offence, I don’t know about living in a country where my natural tendencies could see me end up with the traditional remedy of a bullet in the back of the head.
    “It doesn’t make any difference if you did or you didn’t,” she says, “because you would still be you. And if you were unhappy here, you’d be unhappy there.”

    “But much of our unhappiness is caused by social conditions,” I say.
    “That’s naive socialism,” with some disgust.
    Actually it’s evasive on my part. What started us on this conversation? Perhaps my expression gives away my unease.
    “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was