But Thomas Majors is not ready. The room’s illumination, fluorescent from the lamps, haze-strangled from the sky, isn’t strong enough to tan this new flesh the way it is meant to be.
You thought I was handsome when you met me. I wish you could have seen what I was supposed to be. In my plans, Thomas was perfect. He had golden hair and a complexion like toast. But the light is too weak, and instead I end up with flesh that’s not quite finished.
I can’t wait anymore. I only have room 414 for one week. It’s all Tingting can afford.
So I put on Thomas as carefully as I can, and only when I’m certain that not a single centimeter of what lies beneath him can be seen, I uncover the mirrors.
He’s tight. Unfinished skin usually is. I smooth him down and let him soften. I’m impatient, nervous, so I turn around to check for lumps on Thomas’s back. When I do, the flesh at his neck rips. I practice a look of pain in the mirror.
Then I stitch the gash together as well as I can. It fuses but leaves an ugly ridge across Thomas’s throat. I cover it with a scarf Tingting bought from a street vendor. It’s yellow, imitation silk with a recurring pattern that reads Liu Viuttor.
The next week I spend in study and practice: how to speak proper English, how to stand and sit like a man, how to drink without slurping, how to hold a fork, how to bring my brows together in an expression of concern, how to laugh, how to blink at semi-regular intervals.
It’s extraordinary how much one can learn when one doesn’t have to eat or sleep.
I check out on time carrying all of Thomas Majors’s possessions in a small bag: a fake passport, a hairbrush, a hand mirror, a wallet, a cell phone, and a single change of clothes.
It takes me under twenty-four hours to find a job. A woman approaches me on the sidewalk. She just opened an English school, she says. Would I like to teach there?
The school consists of an unmarked apartment in a gray complex. The students are between ten and twelve years of age, small and rowdy. I’m paid in cash. They don’t notice that my vowels are a bit off; Thomas’s new tongue can’t quite wrap itself around English diphthongs just yet.
On weekday mornings I take more rent-a-whitey gigs. A shipping company pays me to wear a suit, sit at board meetings, nod authoritatively, and pretend to be an executive. A restaurant pays me to don a chef’s hat and toss pizza dough in the air on its opening day. Another English training center, unable to legally hire foreigners in its first year of operation, pays me 6,000 RMB per month to wander through the halls and pretend to work there.
I model, too: for a travel brochure, for a boutique, for a university’s foreign language department. The photographer tells his clients that I was a finalist on America’s Next Top Model. They don’t question it.
China is a perfect place for an imitation human like myself. Everything is fake here. The clothes are designer knock-offs. The DVDs are bootlegs. The temples are replicas of sites destroyed during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The markets sell rice made from plastic bags, milk made from melamine, and lamb skewers made from rat meat. Even the internet is fake, a slow, stuttering, pornless thing whose search engines are programmed not to look in politically sensitive directions.
It was harder in the West. Westerners demand authenticity even though they don’t really want it. They cry out for meat without cruelty, war without casualties, thinness without hunger. But the Chinese don’t mind artifice.
I make friends in China quickly and easily. Many are thrilled to have a tall, blond Westerner to wave around as a status symbol.
I wait a few weeks before I associate with other waiguoren, terrified they’ll pick up on my fake accent or ask me a question about London that I can’t answer.
But none of that turns out to be a problem. Very few expats in China ask questions about what one did back home, likely because so few of them want to answer that question themselves. Generally, they are not successful, well-adjusted members of their native countries. But if they have fair skin and a marginal grasp of English, they can find an ESL job to pay for beer and a lost girl to tell them how clever and handsome they are.
I learn quickly that my Englishman costume is not lifelike. Most of the Brits I meet in China are fat and bald, with the same scraggly stubble growing on their faces, their necks, and the sides of their heads. They wear hoodies and jeans and ratty trainers. Thomas wears a suit every day. He’s thin, too thin for a Westerner. His accent is too aristocratic, nothing at all like the working-class mumbles coming from the real Brits’ mouths. And the scarf only highlights his strangeness.
I think for sure I will be exposed, until one day at a bar a real Englishman jabs a sausage-like finger into my chest and says, “You’re gay, aren’t you, mate?”
When I only stutter in reply, he says, “Ah, it’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You might want to tone it down, though. The scarf’s a bit much.”
And so Thomas Majors’s sexuality is decided. It proves useful. It hides me from the expats the way Thomas’s whiteness hides me from the Chinese.
It’s in a waiguoren bar that New Teach English finds me. A tiny woman not even five feet tall swims through a sea of beery pink bodies to find me sitting quietly in a corner, pretending to sip a gin and tonic. She offers me a job.
“I don’t have a TOEFL certification,” I tell her.
“We’ll get you one. No problem,” she says. And it’s true; a friend of hers owns a printshop that can produce such a document with ease.
“I’m not sure I’ll pass the medical exam required for a foreign expert certificate,” I tell her.
“My brother-in-law works at the hospital,” she says. “If you give him a bottle of cognac, you’ll pass the health exam.”
And that’s how I get my residence permit.
You arrive in my second year at New Teach in Changsha with your eyes downcast and your mouth shut. I recognize you. You’re a fellow impostor, but a more mundane sort than myself. Though hired as an ESL teacher, you can hardly say “Hello, how are you?”
We introduce ourselves by our English names. I am Thomas Majors and you are Daniel Liu. “Liu. Like my scarf,” I joke. I give you a smile copied from Pierce Brosnan.
I lie to you and tell you that I’m from London and my name is Thomas. Your lies are those of omission: you do not mention that you are the son of New Teach’s owner, and that you had the opportunity to study in the United States but flunked out immediately.
Somehow being the only child of rich parents hasn’t made you too spoiled. In your first year at New Teach you sit close to me, studying my counterfeit English as I talk to my students. Meanwhile, I sit close to Sarah, a heavyset Canadian girl, trying to glean real English from her as best I can.
Somehow, my waiguoren status doesn’t spoil me, either. Unlike most Western men in China, I bathe regularly and dress well and arrive to work on time without a hangover every morning, and I don’t try to sleep with my students. My humanity requires work to maintain. I don’t take it for granted.
For these reasons, I am declared the star foreign instructor at New Teach English. I stand out like a gleaming cubic zirconium in a rubbish heap. The students adore me. Parents request me for private lessons with their children. They dub me Da Huang (Big Yellow).
Every six to twelve months, the other foreign teachers leave and a new set takes their place. Only I remain with you. You stay close to me, seeking me out for grammar help and conversation practice. There’s more you want, I know, but you are too timid to ask for it outright, and I am unable to offer it.