Public Relations, Beijing

I.

 

When Jane fell in love with a Kuwaiti,

the embassy warned him against Chinese

 

girls. We’ll revoke your scholarship,

they said. He was a student

 

who ignored the rules

for love (to hear Jane tell it)

 

and traveled with her that summer,

eating sunflower seeds. Unfamiliar

 

language rose and broke from their

throats. She calls him

 

Old Ma still, a leftover

nickname for Madallah.

 

II.

 

The sky in Beijing is bland

the day Jane talks

 

about her love. We said I was his

guide, she laughs, because they were

 

caught in a hotel with no marriage

or money. In seven months

 

of self-criticism at school, she never

confessed that she loved him. Anyway,

 

she says, he went home for American war,

so no one cares about this love anymore.

 

III.

 

Every day of 1995 Jane writes a letter

to Lao Ma. He does not write her

 

because he’s a diplomat and isn’t

allowed to write to Chinese girls.

 

She and I work in an American

office advising on foreign

 

investment in China. Jane does not like

the translation our firm has given

 

General Motors. It means mediocre

motors in Chinese, she tells me. So we

 

write a report recommending revision.

But GM says it’s too late to change

 

their name no matter what.

 

IV.

 

When I meet Madallah in 1997,

Jane has already loved

 

three other boys and warned me:

Lao Ma is not the same anymore.

 

Now, she says, he is a successful

career and a failed personality.

 

Per our personal free trade language

arrangement, we leave each other’s sentences

 

alone. Madallah has married an

arranged woman and come back

 

to Beijing to polish his Chinese

without her. We meet in “Uncle Sam’s”

 

fast food. He and I have only Chinese

in common so when I ask what

it’s like to be married

to him, he cannot gauge my tone

 

and gives me the straight answer

I want: In my country

 

women are like queens; No one

disrespects you on the streets.
V.

 

Jane and I have an emergency

dinner at “Three Four Man,” our

 

favorite Japanese restaurant. Her eyes

are wide and tired. Our dream of love

 

is over, she confirms. Madallah’s new

wife has to sit in the back of the house

 

with a cloth over her face when

men come to play cards

 

(five nights a week). I am surprised

he isn’t busier with matters of the state.

 

Jane says: when he told me this I

shouted. I think her life must be terrible.

 

But over dessert she asks me do I

think his wife is pretty. I know this

 

is a terrible question, she says. And I

know what’s coming: But if she has to

 

wear a cloth over her head anyway,

then why couldn’t she have been Chinese?

 

First published by the Grolier Poetry Prize