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Robert Abel is a winner of the
Flannery O'Connor
Short Fiction Award. Riding a
Tiger is a comic novel
with a tragic twist. It is 'written' by Arnold Fisher as a deposition to
the Chinese Ministry of Justice. Fisher has been arrested and
detained for immoral behaviour and building an illegal financial
empire in
Beijing and beyond. Most importantly, he stands accused of involvement
in the murder of a
communist cadre. In the course of his self-criticism and interrogation he
discovers who has betrayed him, and whom he has betrayed in turn.
Critics Comments
"Fisher is under house arrest and required to write
his testimony as the result of the mysterious death of his friend Chen
Tai-pan.
"As Fisher embarks on the story of his 18 months in
Beijing, his captors occasionally interject with questions:
"'We expect a full accounting of your relationship
with Chen Tai-pan.
I am aware of this, comrades.
When can we expect the details?
I don't know! I'm just not ready. I feel like hell about all that.'
"The peculiarity of this style punctuated by
Fisher's frequent requests, between chapters, for bottles of Beijing
Beer becomes lass jarring as he slides into the story of his
snowballing adventures in capitalism in a communist country.
"Characters richly populate Fisher's life. His
observations are philosophical and heartfelt.
"The tale is a lively,
upbeat and humorous look at Beijing life through the eyes of an
unabashed Westerner."
Ruth
Mathewson
South China Morning Post
Readers Comments
"I
enjoyed the tale very much and Arnold Fisher's discovery of his
betrayal through his own self criticism has some fine ironies. The
story is told in a believable way with believable characters
something which in my experience few western writers taking on China
or the Orient have been able to accomplish."
John Moffett, Norton Books field editor in Asia, ret.
"Subversive humor is an effective weapon against political oppression;
Robert Abel uses it with great skill in his hugely entertaining novel,
Riding a Tiger. Written in the form of a self-critical
deposition required of an American "Foreign Expert" by the Chinese
Ministry of Justice which has charged him with the crime of starting
up a capitalist venture selling water melons and bicycles the
novel combines astute social observation and political commentary with
elements of detective and picaresque fiction. The novel is a page
turner which manages to keep the reader guessing and laughing till the
end. What a little (150pp) gem of a book!"
Prof. Meera Tamaya, Mass. College of Fine Arts
"Riding
a Tiger is a ripping good yarn set in pre-capitalist Beijing. The
plot centers on one visiting American teachers adventures as he and
trusted comrades attempt to turn a crop of watermelons and dozens of
abandoned Russian bicycles into a modest business. Well-drawn
characters, wry humor, savvy observations on cultural encounter.
Highly recommended. Great read. Great re-read"
Terry Y. Allen, Editor Writer
Chapter One
COMRADES:
I was bicycling down Chang An Avenue one morning in June and having
a hell of a time of it because of the wind. My mouth and nose were
covered by a surgeon's mask, the kind you Chinese wear all winter
and during the spring when the winds carry that salmon-pink dust from
the northern deserts and slap it in your face and eyes and sandpaper
all the exposed skin in Beijing. The dust was wicked on this hot,
dry day, and one gust not only slammed me practically to a halt, but
ripped my hat off and sent it sailing down the street behind me.
Of course I couldn't see the hat tumbling down the street,
but its trajectory was readily imaginable. To anyone but a native,
comrades, it would be a little difficult to explain why such a merely
irritating event in most cases was a very, very irritating event in
Beijing. In the first place, as you know, Chang An is a very wide
thoroughfare, as most roads are which course through political officialdom
(on the Madrid model, we could say allowing a clear line of
fire and making it difficult also for anyone to erect a quick blockade
can we say this?) and the outermost traffic lanes reserved for
bicycles are thronged at the hour I was, like about nine million others,
pedaling to work. Such a river of cyclists requires certain etiquette
to prevent a mass tangling of bicycles and people. No way could I
just jam on the brakes, turn around, and retrieve my hat. Easier to
swim up Niagara Falls. I had instead to make my way to the curb, dismount,
stand my bike and run back along the sidewalk in hopes of spying my
hat and then finding enough of an opening in the river of wheels to
grab it without getting crushed.
What, you are asking yourselves, could make a hat, a silly hat, so
important to me? Please understand, comrades, although I was in the
prime of life (a mere forty-five), my hair had taken a permanent vacation
some years hence. Beijing, so cold in winter, is nevertheless on the
same latitude as our Washington, DC one could make too
much of this coincidence and the sun can be merciless. Without
a hat, I suffered terrible headaches after only a few hours in the
China sun, and to me it was an instrument of survival not of
identity, as some of the hotel barflies insisted. I couldn't just
let the hat blow away.
Besides that, the hat had been given to me by a Chinese woman of intense
interest to me, and I couldn't imagine saying to her "Oh, it blew
away somewhere along Chang An." You are not in any case so cavalier
about goods in China and you understand very well, I think, the special
value of goods given in friendship. The hat was English, a golf-style
cap, and it probably set Cao Song-wen back half a week's pay.
But what, Mr. Fisher, were you, an American foreign expert, one
receiving such vast remuneration (almost ten times that of your Chinese
colleagues), doing on a bicycle when the work unit provided a taxi
daily, for the express purpose of chauffeuring you to and from work?
Yes, I understand your pique, but I was not looking a gift horse in
the mouth, as we say. God knows how that phrase will translate. For
the time being, I hope you will be satisfied with a somewhat superficial
explanation, but I will get to the root of your concern in due course.
I was en-bicycled, thus, because:
1) I needed the exercise. Contrary to expectations, the Chinese diet
I had enjoyed for the last year had not stripped off those extra American
pounds so unsightly to the Chinese, so symbolic of decadent excesses,
and so distressing to me personally, for the usual middle-aged reasons,
but made more poignant in my case because of my interest in the woman
who had given me the hat.
2) I wanted to experience life as you Chinese live it endure
it, enjoy it, suffer it. Taking to the streets on a bicycle was a
way of feeling the pulse a little more authentically, made me understand
a little better the privations and stresses of the men and women in
my computer seminars.
3) The taxi driver, Wen Da-xing, was using the time assigned to chauffeur
me to the office to engage in an enterprise which we conspired in
and which was meant to enrich three lives significantly. By this I
mean, to be precise, that taxi driver Wen Da-xing and the beautiful
hat-giver Cao Song-wen were at that very moment about sixty miles
north of Beijing in a dusty little village loading the taxi with watermelons.
You see, comrades, that all of us were at that moment in the grip
of capitalist ideas. And it was my capital that the beautiful Cao
Song-wen was counting into the hands of the watermelon supplier and
which would be the basis for our foray into free-enterprise marketing,
greasing the wheels of a few other projects I will confess in due
time, and greasing also the palms of a few neighborhood officials.
One question you may not have thought to ask, I suspect, is what part
a hat can play in the fate of capitalist and criminal schemes? In
the case of my British golfer, the role was not insignificant. Alas,
at least indirectly, it was to lead to my undoing!
I saw, as I was dashing against the flow of bicycles along Chang An
that morning, that my hat had been blown and propelled to the very
outermost edge of the bicycle lane and was, in fact, imperiled by
the tires of the busses, trucks and taxis pummeling by. While I was
agitatedly waiting for a breach in the flow of bicycles to dash to
the hat's rescue, I saw a young woman coast to a halt, reach down,
pluck the hat up, and cycle away. I tried shouting to her, but the
uproar of traffic and the continuous clangor of the bicycle bells
(bells are used instead of brakes in Beijing, to no effect that I
have been able to observe) made it a silly exercise.
There were, however, a few things of note about the young woman who
had plucked up my cap: she was wearing a very pretty summer skirt,
a kind of rosy purple, she had on sunglasses, and most unusual
of all she was riding a red, woman's style bicycle. Since most
Chinese women on their way to work wear dark slacks, since few Chinese
can afford sunglasses, and since most Chinese bicycles are big, black
or green and unisex, the chances were good, I thought, that this young
woman was, in fact, a Chinese-American, possibly even a student or
foreign expert like myself.
Confident in this illusion, I gave heroic chase. This obviously is
an easy thing for me to say, but comrades I do not overdramatize.
You can imagine, I'm sure, that bicycling in rush-hour Beijing for
a middle-aged man unaccustomed to pedaling your Hong Chi (Red Spirit)
of the twenty-eight inch wheels is no trifling exercise. You will
also appreciate that for me it has never been a simple matter to move
along faster than the already vigorous but gentlemanly pace of the
Beijing bicycle horde, and that there are an incredible number of
hazards that present themselves to the cyclist who deems it necessary
to rush. Busses, for example, routinely sidle into the bicycle lane
to unload and gather passengers, and these custard and burgundy double-length
leviathans can not only blast you with exhaust and cyclones of that
miserable red dust, but funnel you into a dead end where your only
choice is to stop and wait for the bus passengers to clear, or ram
into them an alternative not as despised as one would hope.
The bicycle lane is also chock-a-block with huge tricycles carrying
everything from bamboo brooms in bundles resembling shocks of corn,
to freshly butchered swine (I returned the smiles of several), from
a beautiful pyramid of cabbages to stinking black barrels full of
night soil. And at every intersection waves of bicyclists collide
and cross the lanes of automotive traffic and all the rhythm and flow
of the commuting pace collapses utterly into self-interested chaos
that even the policemen respected as they are cannot whistle
or wave or command into order. Similar jam-ups await us at every roadside
free-market, too. To be in a hurry, therefore, is to pardon
the expression challenge the gods.
I must also acknowledge that the young woman who scooped up my hat
was obviously used to cycling, and although she seemed to be pedaling
quite gracefully and easily, she was, in truth, setting a hell of a pace
for a fat foreign devil like me. I was feeling strain where I never
felt strain before for example, in that little indentation in
one's hip, where the thigh bones join the pelvis. (And what I was
feeling that morning as I pummeled along in so ardent pursuit of my
cap I would feel again two days later in double measure.)
Finally, however, I pulled athwart the lass who had insouciantly
donned my golfer now, and looked pretty pert in it, too, I confess.
The hat fitted her thanks only to a superabundance of the black hair
she sported, for her face was otherwise small, round, and composed
as a ceramic plate. The wind was still coming at us, hard, and had
driven the skirt above her knees and pressed her blouse tightly against
her body so that it was instantly apparent that this was a vigorous
and unusually attractive young lady.
Then as now, I knew very little Chinese, but at least enough so that
when I had startled her into realizing I meant to speak to her, even
ripping along as we were, to say "that is mine" as I pointed
to the hat on her head. She regarded me as if I had said something
quite comic and smiled in a way I can only describe as "merry",
old-fashioned as that will sound, but shook her head, "no,"
and declared in Chinglish, with a wonderful upward lilt and emphasis
on the second word: "Is not your hat."
I tried to mimic what had happened because I could not remember the
word for "wind" (feng or feng li as I now know)
and I can only guess what the woman made of my gestures and gyrations
for she began to laugh so hard she nearly lost control of her bicycle.
When she regained composure, she pointed to a traffic island and shouted
"Stop there!" I coasted behind her, narrowly missed clipping
the rear fender of her bicycle and found myself almost embarrassingly
close when I managed to rein in my old China cruiser.
"Do you speak English?" I asked.
"Such a little bit."
"You see, what happened is this...."
"I know, I know," she said, removing the hat. "The
wint."
"Yes, the wind."
"The wind blow down your hat."
"That's right."
"Maybe you are duwanjier? Foreign expert?"
"Yes. I work for China Electronics Engineering."
I said the name in Chinese. "A teacher."
"Oh yes? I work very near."
"Where? The name?"
"I don't know English." She gave the Chinese name
of her work unit, a clerical office in a petroleum products factory.
"I don't know much Chinese, either," I said.
"Too bad," the girl said, with an easy smile.
"Thank you for returning my hat."
"Welcome." She took off her sunglasses and tilted
her head to get a good look at me, rather like looking at a painting
or some odd, unfamiliar object. I had been in China just long enough
to be used to this unabashed staring you Chinese sometimes seem to
enjoy. "What do you call this?" She cupped her chin in her
hand.
"A beard."
"Beard," she repeated. "Is marvelous thing!"
I laughed, a bit embarrassed. "Thank you." Bicycles were streaming
past, bells jangling. "Where do you study English?"
"Books only. Television."
"On your own?"
She shrugged. "I don't know this meaning."
"By yourself. No teacher."
"No teacher. Yes. I like to have teacher, but no luck."
"I'll be your teacher," I said.
"No!" she said in disbelief. "I cannot pay."
"You teach me Chinese, I teach you English." I pulled
out my wallet and gave her my card. Then I said in Chinese that I
lived at the Friendship Hotel (You Yi Bing Guan) and that I would like
to practice Chinese with her once or twice a week.
"And I can study English?"
"Sure. Why not?"
She put the card in the pocket of her skirt where it didn't look very
secure to me. I felt a little silly suddenly, old foreign fart talking
to this exquisite Chinese youth. She patted her thigh, her wonderfully
solid thigh, mounted her bicycle, and said,
"Maybe."
"I hope so," I said. "What is your name?"
She laughed lightly, donned her sunglasses and pushed into the traffic.
I followed her for a few blocks and she did look back once or twice,
and she did smile. When she turned south on Xie Dan Jie, I waved and
was damned certain I was seeing the last of her. Too bad! I thought.
What a sweet girl.
Comrades! What can I say? Surely it was at this moment that the first
watermelons were being loaded into the No 1 taxi of China Electronics
Engineering Company. I retied my surgical mask, pulled my hat to my
eyebrows, and cycled on. Copyright © Robert Abel
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