The Treehouse

I had flown to China with a postcard in my hand. My grandmother didn't want me to. Why should I go back to the place she had taken so many pains to run away from sixty years ago to get to Manila? The Philippines was glamorous then, before it melted in its own torpor. Europe and America creolized in Asia, Què hora es? A las ocho y media, sir, good morning, how d'ye do, how d'ye do? because the sun never sets in the Western empire. Before I left for the airport, my grandmother told me to be careful in the mud alleys.

The postcard I had was a picture of a language university in Beijing that specialized in teaching Mandarin to foreigners. Once in the Philippines, when I was eleven, I had to recite the week's lesson from memory to the teacher in Mandarin class. This was the way we learned the language carved on steles in a tiny family shrine somewhere across the ocean. I had spent the night before reading out loud from my little exercise book and hoping school would be canceled the next morning. It was monsoon season and the floods rose from the gutters blocked with garbage and the beggars' children played naked in the waters. But the storm left at dawn, and memory is unreliable, selective, compressed. The next day I finally received on my palm the two red stripes that I had been avoiding during the entirety of my young life in school.

Eight years later I was sent to Beijing with my parents' blessings, and a friend of mine fell in love one winter night when she went to the malatang.

Now malatang kept you warm. That's why my friend had gone to one. I'm not going to tell you what each syllable means; I'm not here to teach you Chinese. I'm here to tell you what Beijing was like beyond the language classes. Malatang was a street-vendor's boiler filled with skewers of meats, innards, seaweed, tofu, and mushrooms that floated in a dark oily soup of chili and cayenne pepper. Malatang was choosing pig intestines and whisking the oil off towards the pavement before burning your tongue. Malatang was huddling together with strangers who looked like you and reading advertisements pasted on electric poles. Malatang was sucking the bitter north wind to cool the spice in your mouth and keeping your eyes from tearing, while the vendor counted the wooden skewers that you had speared into your broken half of a Styrofoam rice box.

Malatang kept you warm and kept off hunger till you reached home.

My friend looked like me and studied in the same building as I did, but she was from Canada and never got stripes for not being able to speak Mandarin. She met a Korean student at a malatang. Love at first skewer just outside the campus gates, where the red-cheeked lady selling small bottles of fermented milk on her bike would look enviously at the little fish-cake stall across from her. Chocolate fish-cakes were pastries shaped like fish with hot chocolate inside, sold for one yuan each. No one bought fermented milk. The man who sold fish-cakes was called 'Uncle;' business was doing so well that for one week Uncle's stall disappeared because he was hiding from the police for making too much money without a license. He reappeared just in time for the winter frost.

The Koreans are invading the Beijing suburbs, but the city is still the stronghold of the Europeans. I have a map of what old Beijing was like in 1936, drawn just before World War Two. The Legation Quarter used to be on Chang An Road; now Chang An Road is lined with malls enclosing the Forbidden City. The foreign embassies have been moved to Jianguomen, in the Chaoyang district, European Union flags flapping over the wire fences. Europe is extraordinarily chic in Beijing nowadays; the city is making up for lost time. I have seen the diplomats' children in Chaoyang, with their white skin, brown hair, big blue eyes; pudgy eleven-year-olds speaking Mandarin over the counter at the coffeehouse. They never got stripes either, I would suppose. The cafè where I saw them had French movie posters on the walls and it was next to a little stationery shop that sold notebooks with old paint advertisements from Copenhagen printed on the cover.