BY CATHY ADAMS
We were halfway to the park and the bus was stifling hot. Three rows back, Aimmee and Gwen were singing, “Wash out my stains, bleach my sins whiiiite, and shower me with your powerfuuuullove!” I loved that song in college. I sang it with the worship band at the Thursday night services, but today, hearing it screeched across the bus in this heat, the words made my skin crawl. I was already wishing I hadn’t come. Bo kept trying to take my hand, but it felt like a hot wet towel over my fingers. We were missionaries in China, married only six months. I crossed my arms. The words, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” rolled through my mind. I submit and I submit.
“Are you hungry? Do you want a drink yet?” he asked, his voice rising in little hops at the end of each question.
“No.” I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything that sounded right.
“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he announced in a voice meant for all the other missionaries seated around us. “Dancers, music, and food from countries all over the world. I can’t wait.”
Bo kept looking at me and then looking around at the other passengers to see if they were seeing him looking at me, his habit since we were dating. I am his first. He is my first. We saved ourselves for one another and he regularly reminds the world in case it forgets. He sat pressed next to me on the sticky vinyl seat. I met him last year on a school mission trip to Haiti when he was only twenty. Because Bo was standing next to me in a group photo, my parents assumed we were ready for our courtship. “Remember your purity pledge,” my mother would say before we went out for lunch after church. At the engagement meeting my parents arranged with his, I sat singing in my head to calm my nerves. His parents smiled at me with teeth that looked as if they’d been forced into their mouths. Bo’s hairline receded in the same pattern as his father’s. I remember thinking, hair is not a part of my requirements for a Christian husband, so I erased it from the list I carried in my head. Now, each morning I pick the hairs from his pillow and look at them in the palm of my hand. My husband, falling away before my eyes.
“Do you need a towelette?” asked Bo. “You’re really sweaty. Are you okay?”
“Can you not do that?” I hung my head down and heard my mother’s voice. Ella, hold your head up. It’s unseemly to look at the top of a girl’s head.
“What am I doing, Ella?” Still too loud.
I dropped my head even further and whispered again. “That thing you do when you have a conversation with me and everyone else within earshot all at the same time.”
“What thing? What?” Bo smiled. It was his nervous smile, the one he used when he wanted to pretend things were not getting to him when, clearly, they were. His receding hairline was blistered with sweat.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine,” I said and turned my head toward the open window. I curved my lips in the barest of smiles and watched the city streets of Xinzheng race by.
The “amusement park” that our tour guide, Mr. Chen, had gushed about, was actually an astro-turf covered city block surrounded by a blue plastic fence. A greeting line of young people who all appeared to be junior high to high school age awaited us as we stepped off the bus. A man with a megaphone, his blue-black hair combed Don Draper style, greeted us. “Hello and welcome to World Culture Park of Zhengzhou. We are happy for to visit from our good American new friends. You will see the dances of the world cultures at each of the culture houses and enjoy us with cuisines of the world. Thank you for your listening. This way, please.” He motioned toward the Tibetan House, a white plastic, square tent festooned with peeling blue geometric designs. A mascot in an over-sized mouse suit led us toward the yurt. The tiny woman inside the suit gripped the side of the mouse head at the neckline to keep it from falling while she waved us forward. A red and white polka-dotted skirt hung past her knees, and an oversized matching bow flopped sideways on her helmeted mouse head. Plastic lips framed by exaggerated cheeks were brown with a thousand children’s kisses.
“I guess that Minnie’s seen better days,” said Bo in a voice too loud. A few people snickered.
“Some of them can understand English,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry. Don’t want to be rude,” said Bo, swiveling his upper body to make sure everyone heard his apology, and we all fell into line behind the mouse.
Bright floral rugs covered the floors and walls inside the plastic tent. White plastic chairs formed a circle around the perimeter broken only by four musicians seated on pillows. One played a kang-ling, one held cymbals, and a third had a conch shell. An old man with a long horn, or dungchen, sat closest to the wall. At a signal from the man with the bullhorn, the musicians began making sounds as if they were each playing different tunes in different meters.
“You don’t hear this every day, do you?” exclaimed Bo.
“No, no I don’t,” I replied.
Gwen leaned forward in her chair and tapped my leg. “This is just what I imagine when I think of the horns of Jericho.” She gave me a big, tight-lipped smile and nodded her head, her ponytail flopping behind her.
“You think of a Tibetan longhorn?” I asked.
“The sound. It’s like the Lord calling. Don’t you think so?”
Back at Emmaus, I wanted to learn to play the harp. I registered for a string class the last semester before graduation, but not enough students registered. It was cancelled. On Sundays before morning service, I’d sneak up to the music room and lightly strum my fingers over the strings, pretending to be an angel.
The five young women from the line outside the bus came dancing through the tent flap and formed a circle. They wore red and black dresses with red sparkly scarves tied in over-sized bows around their heads. Red, yellow, blue and green aprons hung over their skirts and swirled as they danced.
“How do you like it?” asked Bo, his eyes stuck on the young dancers.
“I’m just thinking how, I mean–” I stopped myself because I really didn’t know what I was thinking.
“I know what you mean.” Bo clasped my shoulder and nodded. “You want to witness to them. I do, too.”
“Actually, I was wondering, do they all live here together somewhere?”
Bo looked at me, and then he looked back at the dancers, his mouth hanging slightly open. “I’m sure the government provides housing for them since this is considered a cultural exchange.”
“What are we exchanging?” I asked.
The dance ended and Bo began clapping. I wasn’t sure why I asked the question or why I was being impatient. Maybe it was the heat, or the way Bo kept smiling at the dancers like a proud father, or a creepy admirer. It was hard to tell the difference.
The dancers hurried out of the tent, and the man with the bullhorn passed around a tray of tiny plastic cups of, “Genuine mare’s milk of Tibet!” It tasted just like the skim milk I bought at the market with some turmeric sprinkled in.
When everyone finished their milk, the man raised his bullhorn. “And now you will please go to Hmong Village of Laos!”
Dirty Minnie appeared at the door and gestured grandly for us to follow once more. We walked a dozen meters past the Tibetan house and arrived at a Laotian stilt house. I slid my hand over the railings only to discover they were plastic molded to resemble bamboo. The roof was an enormous umbrella-shaped frame covered in clear plastic with dried grass stapled and duct-taped into place. Inside, five young women wearing golden pointed headpieces, red dresses, and clusters of bracelets, began a dance involving lots of backwards twisting of their hands. The musicians from the Tibetan house had added conical hats, and the man with the cymbals was now playing a Saw-U.
Bo nodded and smiled at them as he clicked photos with his cell phone. “Don’t you think this is marvelous?” He was suddenly excited. “I mean, this time last year did you ever think we’d be here, seeing all this?” He gestured broadly at the hut. “This is all so. . .I never saw anything like this at Emmaus.”
One of the dancers stepped closer and flicked her wrists at Bo. Fumbling to take her photo as her hips writhed, he turned red with embarrassment. With a slight smirk on her face, she turned away and began flicking her wrists at someone else. The music changed, the five young dancers disappeared, and the three boys took over the dance area. They had changed into baggy gold slacks and vests and began leaping while twirling dowels bedecked with yellow ribbons. “This looks like a gymnastics routine we did in high school,” said Aimmee.
“But it’s so good!” exclaimed Gwen, and she began clapping in rhythm to the music. The song ended, the boys departed, and the man with the bullhorn carried a tray around the circle of viewers. “One nut per person, please. This is the famous malva nut of Laos! The malva nut is the special nut!”
“This is amazing,” said Bo. “Don’t you think this is amazing?” Aimmee and Gwen nodded in agreement, their smiles broad and oddly nervous.
“Yes, it’s a very good nut.” I smiled back at them, but bits of malva got stuck in my throat and I began to cough. I tried to speak, but each time I opened my mouth I began coughing. I waved my hands in frustration, and then pushed past everyone on my way out the door. Bo followed me to the sidewalk outside. He pulled off his backpack and began searching around inside. “Here,” he said in his I’m-speaking-to-everyone voice, “Have a Capri-Sun.”
I sucked a bit of nut further into my throat and started to wheeze. I took the drink but in my state of anxiety I dropped the drinking straw.
“That was the last Capri-Sun,” Bo exclaimed. “The last one!” He stared at my shaking hands then down at the straw on the ground.
“I’m sor–” My apology was cut off by another cough.
“I mean that was really the last one! It was the last Capri Sun we brought from the U.S. I saved the last one for this trip.”
“Still good,” I croaked, holding up the packet.
“That was the Orange Pineapple Tango,” he whined.
Still coughing and wheezing, I turned the packet over in my hands, trying to think of a way to get at the now lukewarm juice inside. Gwen whisked up behind me, her hand deep in her handbag. “Now, now, every little problem can be solved with the right tool.” She fished around in her bag, and then she pulled out something that looked like a pencil. “Here, let me have it.” Taking the juice from me, she expertly punctured it with what I could now see was a coffee straw and handed it back. “Drink it slowly.” She peered at me over her glasses. “It’s important for a wife to always be prepared,” she said gently, and then in a lower voice she added, “what if this had been your child’s juice?” She raised her eyebrows and walked away.
Having downed half the juice, I could breathe normally again. “How do you prepare for that?” I asked. “It was a juice accident.”
I held out the juice packet to Bo, a plastic peace offering dribbling with warm fruity flavor. He hesitated, then straightened up taller and put on his smile. “I’m sorry for getting upset. I want you to have the last juice,” he said in his broadcast voice.
“No, please, there’s enough for you to have some, too,” I said, more quietly. “I want you to have the rest. I’m fine now. Really.”
His lips were twitching.
From further down the sidewalk, Mr. Bullhorn called to us and waved his hand impatiently. “Everyone, please! To the Lawa house!”
The house of the Lawa people looked suspiciously like the house of the Laotian, or Hmong people, all the way down to the plastic bamboo railing leading inside, except in this house the plastic apex of the roof was higher. Dancers in flowing, multi-colored scarf skirts twirled and whirled in yet another circle. Soon, the five dancers scurried out the door, and Mr. Bullhorn came forth with a tray of, “Squid Crackers, snack of Thailand! Take only one, please!” Dirty Minnie mimed the act of eating a cracker and pointed at the tray. We took ours last and were then ushered out the door.
I caught sight of the last of the five young women closing the back door to the next house. “Bo, did you see that? These aren’t dancers of the world. They’re the same five women every time. They just change costumes.”
“Are you sure?” he said, squinting through his glasses at the closed door of the building.
“Come next to Vietnam house! Kinh people of Vietnam!” Mr. Bullhorn waved us toward the house, another stilted, plastic bamboo structure with dried grass covering the plastic roof. Inside, the walls were lined with wooden lattice covered in dingy gauze. We sat next to the entrance on pink plastic stools. One of the musicians pulled out a new stringed instrument and a dancer began singing a Ca Tru song. I recognized her as the tall, pretty one who had flirted with Bo.
“I have an idea,” I said to Bo.
“Shhhh.” He motioned toward the performers. They waved their hands and stepped smartly in a circle, and when the first dancer passed the backdoor hidden behind the gauze through which they’d entered, she pulled the fabric aside and ran outside, followed by the other three, and then the singer.
Mr. Bullhorn almost ran into me as I stood up. He carried a tray of banh tieu, Vietnamese doughnuts, each cut in half. This was the one snack I was loath to pass up, but I couldn’t stay in that crowded, dank place another second. Our host began making his way around the room with the tray. I ducked out the door, leaving Bo behind. Running, I made it to the Malaysian house, a blue structure that looked wooden just like the Vietnam house, but at the entrance I could see that it was made of textured plastic poles. Inside, the dancers were peeling off their scarf skirts revealing black leotards underneath, the same outfits we wore in our Faithful, Fit, and Firm exercise classes at church.
“What?” Exclaimed the flirting dancer. She halted, mid-change of her skirt. “You’re supposed to wait with the visiting teacher group.” Her English was almost unaccented.
“Can’t I just wait right here? They’ll be here any minute.” I motioned toward one of the rows of pink plastic stools and then slid onto it, daring anyone to defy me.
She huffed a little and pressed the Velcro snap closed on her pink satin skirt. The other four pulled on their costumes, and up close I could see strings hanging from torn hems and the stains from years of rapid costume changes and not enough dry cleanings.
“You speak really good English,” I said, trying to be friendly.
“So do you,” she quipped.
“Are you from around here?”
This time she openly scoffed. Reaching into a cardboard box, she pulled a long white scarf with a pink design printed down the border and flipped it around her neck. “San Francisco.”
“I . . . what did you say?”
“San Francisco. It’s where I learned dance. ODC Dance Commons. It’s also where I learned to ‘speak really good English,’” she said, her last words mocking me. Just as we heard the rest of the group approaching, she kicked the cardboard costume box behind a curtain and the five of them lined up to perform. The musicians had just made it through a hidden side door and were now out of breath. They dropped onto the floor and began playing what sounded much like the same song they played in the Vietnamese house.
Bo was the first one through the door. “Why’d you run off? We had doughnuts. You love doughnuts.”
“I just, I needed air.”
“You’re acting a little strange, Ella. Are you okay?” For once his voice was soft enough to stay just between us. A sudden rise in the music drowned out any response I might have given. The five young women spun, swirled, clapped their hands, and flipped their white scarves at the crowd. But the room began turning and I thought I’d be sick.
“I need to go outside,” I whispered in his ear.
This time he followed, and we sat about ten meters further down the sidewalk on a low bench underneath a plastic palm tree next to the Borneo village house. I closed my eyes and dropped my head. After a few minutes, we heard applause. The dance had ended. The five dancers exited the side door of the Malaysian house and ran toward a side door of the Borneo house right next to us. The dancer who had learned English in San Francisco hesitated at the door and studied us a moment before she disappeared inside. From the Malaysian house, the man on his bullhorn called out, “Yao zha guai and soy milk for dipping. The breakfast of the Malays!”
“Crullers,” said Bo.
“Curlers?” I asked.
“No,” he said, laughing. “Not curlers! Crullers, the Malaysian snack. I saw it on the back table. He had a tray of crullers all cut up into pieces.” Bo kept laughing and his voice grew louder and louder. He slapped at his pant legs and each time I thought he was going to stop laughing, it renewed itself. I raised my head and looked him in the eye, but he couldn’t return the look without breaking up into laughter all over again. It was like sitting in a junior high school study hall where everything seemed more than it really was. Where every silly joke was more than funny, it was hysterical. And anything exciting made you well up all giddy inside as if you’d won the lottery. I think that was what bothered me most about Bo: he had to take every moment and hold it out between his thumb and forefinger so everyone around could examine it along with him. No matter how apathetic I looked back at him, he kept grinning and snickering.
“Come on, now,” said Bo. “That was funny. Where’s your sense of humor?”
“Yeah, it was funny,” I said, trying to smile, but I didn’t laugh. The musicians ambled, exhausted, out the back door of the Malaysian house and dragged their instruments into the Borneo house. “Let me guess. When we go in the Borneo house there will be five young women in colorful skirts and scarves twirling around and the musicians will play a version of the same song we’ve heard in the last three places.”
Bo got up and peaked in the entrance. “Nope,” he said, returning to the bench. “You’re wrong. There are eight dancers in there. The three guys will be dancing with them.”
“So, all of them are doing a dance number. And when it’s over Mr. Bullhorn will pass around a tray of goldfish crackers and tiny cups of pineapple juice while those five girls run into the Japanese house and put on big fake Geisha headpieces and kimonos. And then they’ll twirl around for three minutes, and when it’s over we’ll all get a sip of Lipton tea while they run into the next building! Why didn’t they just schedule a big foot race for everybody? We could have chased those girls around the park. It would have been more fun.”
“Ella, I don’t know what’s got into you. Why are you so mad?” asked Bo. “It’s just a fun culture outing.”
“No, it’s fake! It’s wrong. Nothing here is authentic. None of it!” I flailed my arms in a circle around my head. “It was all a big mistake and we settled for it. We settled for it because we thought this was something real!”
Bo shook his head and his mouth hung open. He watched the crowd exit the Malaysian house and continue past us on their way to the Borneo house, but I no longer cared if any of them heard me or not. I thought I’d explode in the heat if I stopped now. “We made a mistake, Bo. We made a terrible mistake, and I’m so sorry.” I wanted to hang my head again, but I made myself look at him. Several of the others halted on the sidewalk, but Gwen pushed them along past us.
“Is this about the Capri Sun?” asked Bo. “Because I said I was sorry.”
I pressed my fingers into my eyes in desperation and stood up. “No, this is not about the damn Capri Sun.”
“Ella!” Bo exclaimed and jumped up from his seat.
The music from Borneo house began, and Dirty Minnie waved frantically at the door for everyone to come in.
“It’s us. It’s about us,” I hissed.
“I don’t understand. We got married. I married you, and we’re sharing our life together. We’re joined for life as husband and wife. That’s the way, Ella. It was ordained.” Bo picked up his backpack and put it back down again, unsure what his hands were supposed to be doing. We both stood there next to fake Borneo listening to the music until the song mercifully ended.
There was something I wanted to say, to get out, but no matter how hard I squeezed my eyes shut and searched my head, nothing sounded right, but I tried again. “I was nineteen, Bo. It just doesn’t feel right. You and me. I’m wondering if maybe it wasn’t the right thing for us.” The words burned my throat.
“It was God’s will!”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “’Cause now it just feels like it was our will.”
The sweat from Bo’s forehead had soaked into his hairline and his eyes were turning pink. The five young women came out the door and crossed the grass next to us on their way to the Japanese house. The one from San Francisco hesitated a moment as I resumed my speech. “I just don’t think. . . I’m sorry, but this shouldn’t have happened. I can’t keep running around faking it and pretending like this is something real because it’s not. It never was. It’s just like everything here: pretend and fake and bad and, and less than. Nobody’s getting what they want yet we’re all acting like everything’s so nice and good, but we’re miserable.”
One of the other dancers called out in Chinese from the door of the Japanese house to the young woman listening to us, but I couldn’t decipher her words.
“I’m not miserable,” said Bo, his voice now so soft and trembling no one could hear it but me and the San Francisco dancer.
“Aren’t you?”
San Francisco, Bo, and I stood there waiting and knowing. It was the knowing that made me feel so crummy to the core. I hated myself. I fought back every cliché I knew and found nothing else to say. The young woman studied me, and then she did something unexpected. She tilted her head back and let her eyes shut at the blistering hot sky as if to receive a kiss, or maybe a blessing. I was a strange witness to some satisfaction she was making public, some resolution. Then she took off in a slow trot to the next venue and left me there with Bo as the crowd from fake Borneo veered past the two of us and into fake Japan.