"NDA"

Zhang woke up to a scorching headache on her left side.  The man who had directed a scholarship for her was snoring.  His jelly rolls of mass leaked out in all directions sprawled out over the cushion of the bed in the Westin 30^th floor in Palm Beach.  His shirt blended in with the tapestry.  There was a half-drunk wine glass with shot of aspirin on the bedside table.  A wallet with the man’s wife and children by its side.

The man claimed that his grey and balding head, peppered with a sly, cocksure smile, wasn’t enough to charm women, so why try, he joked in New Yorkian dialect.  He liked to use that dialect to signal frankness, as if he were an honest man.  Why not just be direct with what he wanted, he stated, and he was certainly direct this time.  The playful banter she exchanged at a conference with him, while he was lecturing on Chinese economics (from a very safe American perspective, she though), was replaced by direct orders this time.  She wasn’t charmed so much as reluctantly pulled to the bedroom, but she put on her best smile for him, because she was so lucky.

He had wide lips with dark green eyes and a shirt with coffee stains on them when he insisted that she take off her velvety dress.  He called her dress very cute in that “Oriental” way.  He wondered out loud if she had a boyfriend.  She didn’t.  He insisted she get and maintain a boyfriend: “women like you are desired by everybody,” he said, encouraging her to pursue a romantic life.  “I want you to be desired.”

Then, last week, she received a different sort of invitation.  The journalist was pleasant but aggressive, asking for details about the man sleeping next to her.  She didn’t respond to the email, because she was under NDA.

“You don’t understand, Zhang,” the man had said over lunch last year, the first time he had come to see her, “that a man like me needs to feed to survive, needs to see the fruits of his accomplishment.  People like you, Zhang.  Look what you’ve done.  I just want to be in your air.  Your treasured, beautiful air.”

And she believed him and she accepted his flattery because her mom had always told her to respect highly credentialed men in charge of the world’s leading universities.  Ever since she had gained admission from China, her mom had been living on a cloud that her daughter was to be accepted at the most prestigious university in the world.  Even villagers in the town of Hanzhou where they lived were struck in awe.  She must really be one in a million, they all thought.

She really was.  The admissions rates of her university were jaw-droppingly low, and that wasn’t even to account for the millions of people in her hometown who would never apply for fear of not making the cut.

When Zhang arrived at the prestigious university, she found herself underneath a haze of deconstructive ideas.   The first idea to be destroyed in the minds of the tenured staff was traditional romance.  Romance was dead, argued the philosophy professor he had brought in from another prestigious university, to tell the starry-eyed undergraduates that their man in shining armor is a farce created by the patriarchy.  Sex was an exchange, no more.  Tits-for-tat, the philosophy professor let slip.  The woman giggled admiringly, and the professor reveled in said attention gained from his position of semiotic influence.  Five years ago, as that undergraduate, she believed him.  She believed him because he was a philosophy professor with a Ph.D. from a prestigious university.  And so when the man opened himself up to her, she went along with it, believing that sex was an exchange, and she was a lucky girl indeed.

She was so lucky.  Her career had accelerated since then.  She was, out of over 250 candidate, the lone professor selected for the famous Mac Arthur Prize in Economics last year, and right after that, the offers started swarming.  Yes, she was aware the man sleeping next to her was on the Board of that Mac Arthur Prize, but that was all fine and well, as the man sat on many Boards.  So she chose to believe that her career acceleration was due primarily to her hard work, rather than through the subtle influence of the man’s name plastered along the prize’s walls.

She believed this to wash down the feeling that she was persuading herself to go along with the powerful man’s powerful antics because the alternative was to get her wings nipped.  It wasn’t the idea of failing that Zhang feared most, but the idea that she didn’t get her professorship based on the greatness of her papers.  

So she chose to believe that she was a professor because of hard work.

Yet, when the man came onto her, she did not say no.  Because she didn’t really want to sleep with the man.  But she believed she did.  She did want to sleep with the man.

The journalist last week was so nosy.  Asking her to answer a few questions about her relationship with this man.  She of course ignored his repeated inquiries because she was under NDA.

If the man felt that their affair wasn’t wrong, why did he ask her to sign an NDA?

Because the man had a very important job.  And that job required silence from his inner and outer circle, the kind that upholds a man’s reputation on sticks.

If this way of doing things wasn’t wrong, why did she have to sign an NDA?

It’s just a waiver of rights, the man cooed, as harmless as signing a paper to go play laser tag or something.  It was just something he had to do everywhere he went.  He had a whole lot of moral good left to do, a lot of fixing poverty and health care and education to do. 

She believed him, because he was the president of the most prestigious university in the world, and the president of the most prestigious university must have had the power to do a lot of good.

And because she was so lucky.

Zhang looked at the man, and thought about how much of a pinnacle man he was.

And so Zhang went back to sleep.  This, all this, was what she worked her whole life for.  This was the American Dream.