Last Days in Shanghai. Casey Walker
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the latest in agricultural projects or hi-tech districts. Leo would probably be photographed in a hard hat or a lab coat, looking like an asshole. We’d eat dinner with provincial officials inside some newly built business park in the gutted center of an ancient city. I braced for it: Leo sour and glowering, none of the meetings up to the level of his ambitions, and so heaping his frustrations on me, stone after stone. It was Wednesday. I’d suffer him without respite through Sunday. We’d fly home out of Shanghai, but even as I longed for that flight, I knew it wouldn’t mean reprieve—just more business-class hours of Leo elbowing me awake to share his ailments. I’d brought two suits in one small suitcase, but I was starting to think that packing light wasn’t smart when you were going to be eating all your meals with unfamiliar utensils. On the plane, I’d spilled sauce from gingered pork on the sleeve of one of my dress shirts. The hardened stain already looked permanent.
THE ASIA HOTEL on Workers’ Stadium Road had floors of what looked like—though, really, who could tell?—marble. It was polished slick until it was actually dangerous. The lobby wasn’t busy, and while Leo checked in I gave my suitcase a kick to see how far it would glide to the elevator. Most of the way, it turned out.
A young man intercepted us. He held a sign: Congressman Mr. Leonard Filmore.
“I am CCPIT driver,” he said. “For meeting?”
“There are two Ls in ‘Fillmore,’” Leo said.
The elevator pinged, and Leo stepped in. He stood with his legs apart in the middle of the tight space and punched at his phone like force would scare it into compliance. He let the doors close onto my shoulder. I pushed in next to Leo, and the driver held his sign out toward us. “Give us ten minutes,” I said, as the elevator closed in his face. Leo pounded the lit key for the top floor and groaned when we slowed to let me out five stories below him.
I turned every switch in my hotel room, but the lights never came on. I couldn’t get the automated curtains to open, so I changed clothes in the half dark. The room phone rang, and because I was sure it was Leo, and I knew he was angry, I made him wait ten rings.
“Yes?” I said.
“I’m calling to tell you that you’re a fucking liar,” Leo said.
“Does your room not have electricity, either?”
“I’m on a lobby phone,” Leo said. “You’re late.”
They told me at the front desk, once it was too late to matter, that I had to put my room key into a slot near the door to activate the power.
BEIJING TRAFFIC WAS abysmal, and it took nearly an hour to get to the meeting—a drive that would take fifteen minutes, the driver said, “in middle night.” Hundreds of bicycles passed our tinted windows. I took a few pictures through the glass, most of which came out showing Beijingers in mid-pedal with the ghostly reflection of my face superimposed on them. One of our constituents had called the office only last week to complain about an article she’d read alleging China was slaughtering stray dogs by the tens of thousands. I’d thanked her for her concern and promised to look into it. That wasn’t enough. She wanted the congressman to introduce an International Bill of Canine Rights. She had drafted one herself. She wouldn’t let me off the phone until I promised I would give it “serious time.” It arrived two days later, handwritten, on yellow legal paper—so clearly loved and so deeply felt that I had nothing but sadness for the woman’s effort. It stunk with amateurism, and no one would give it a moment’s thought.
Beijing was so dug up, I imagined rats in swarms. Two townhouses on my block in DC were under renovation—so minor, compared to this—and for weeks now I slept and woke to scratching mice. I’d decided to be ecumenical, thinking the mice had as much right to scramble and thrive as I did. But then I saw their shit in the pan I scrambled eggs in. After that, I set traps—broke their necks, one by one.
“You know what’s different about this skyline?” Leo said. “No churches. How long you think they’ll last without God?”
“Without our God?”
“Without Jesus.”
“I think they’ll last awhile,” I said.
He grabbed me by the back of the neck and shook me. I think it was meant to be playful.
“You’re lukewarm, Luke,” Leo said. “Spiritually, there isn’t a worse place to be.”
Like many latecomers to religion, the congressman had a past that didn’t square with this current revival of faith. He said he’d spent years looking for love in a drink—“My genetic affliction,” he called it. Sober Leo was supposed to be the new skyline of the man. But where others saw renovation, I saw scurrying rats. I didn’t think he’d read much of the Bible outside of some red-letter verses of Matthew, and I could more than match him just from remembered Sunday school. To me, his salvation by Christ sounded scripted. But then again, part of my job was writing his scripts. It was hard to discern where my failures ended and his began.
THE BUND INTERNATIONAL translator who met us at the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade was a young woman—around my age, I imagined—with impeccable, professional English, crisp as the pleat in her skirt. Her name was Li-Li. My first words to her were an apology.
She led us to a conference room set with lidded porcelain teacups. Framed letters of praise from leaders around the world hung six to a wall, including one from a nasty despot whose removal the congressman had very publicly supported. The letters reminded me of schoolchildren’s valentines: To Beijing, in eternal friendship.
The men we were supposed to meet, though I had lost the papers telling me exactly who they were, kept us waiting. The congressman reached obsessively into his pocket, not because his phone was ringing, but because it wasn’t, and it made him feel marooned. I stared at a winding scene of the Yellow River done in a sparkling mosaic on the facing wall. Finally, three men appeared. We stood, they bowed. They were solemn, early forties, ranged from slim to paunchy. Bureaucrats I imagined you could purchase by the pound in an office supply store. Li-Li sat at the distant head of the table, as though translation were a work of umpiring, and she wasn’t partial to either side.
My notes from that day reflect a circular conversation of platitudes and vague promises. China and the United States could work together “for mutual benefit”—a “win-win situation.” We prepared to sign some nonbinding documents of mutual praise. The pens they gave us were exquisite, worth far more than the pledges.
Leo, who never took a note himself, scribbled something on the back of a receipt. He had me announce that we were taking “a short recess,” our code for “emergency bathroom break.” I looked at Li-Li and waited for her to filter my English into Mandarin. Leo left the room, walking gingerly.
With Leo gone, the officials began to speak among themselves in staccato bursts, and I waited for them to acknowledge me. Li-Li clicked her fingernails against one another, and their polish shined in the light. I caught her eye and was about to say something to her when I saw her breathe in sharply and redden. Her eyes flicked toward the men, then back to me, and I wondered what kind of insult she’d understood that I hadn’t. I took Leo to be the target of the men’s mockery, if only because I was too insignificant to be worth denigrating.
When the congressman grumbled back into the room, the trade officials stood.
“This has been most productive,” one said, “and now we must adjourn for urgent matters.”
Whether this meeting would bring even a single shoelace out of their country and into ours was doubtful, even if we talked for three more hours, but Leo clearly felt that if they’d ended the meeting first, even if he was ready to leave, then he had lost their respect.
“We should have left half an hour ago,” he told the officials.
With every man in the room now annoyed or offended, we nevertheless posed for photographs. I took paired grip-and-grin shots and more inclusive group ones. The men who I suspected had just sat mocking the congressman clustered around him.