Beautiful Country by J.R. Thornton

while. The Hard Rock Cafe proved to be an unlikely savior during my year in China. Its mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers neither looked nor tasted like they did in America, but they were closeenough. And they proved to me that the world I left behind still existed.
    I asked David how they could get WrestleMania on television, and he said they could get a lot of other channels too, and he showed me where CNN, BBC, and HBO were. We watched Triple H a little longer. David jumped up and down on the sofa throwing punches and kicks as if they would somehow help his hero, Triple H, but David’s efforts were in vain as the Hardy Boyz proved too much, and Triple H limped out of the ring with a promise to return. I remembered the new DVDs I had just bought. I patted David on the back and told him I was going to my room.
    The quality of the first DVD was shockingly bad, very grainy, and there seemed to be a black furry patch in the bottom left corner. About four minutes into the film, the furry patch moved, and I realized it was the head of a person. Someone had brought a camera to the movie theater and recorded the film. I ejected that film and tried another. That was how I learned it was a mistake to buy movies that had just come to the theaters. The slightly older ones already on DVD were much better quality. This rule generally applied unless it was award season. During this time the movie companies sent out DVDs of all the new and still-in-theater films to film critics. Somehow these discs made their way to pirates. Once in a while I’d get a DVD that had “This movie is strictly for Academy Awards judging purposes only” scrolling across the bottom.
    This became my routine. Most days I would get home from tennis and go straight to my room until it was time for dinner. Sometimes David was waiting for me. I could tell he wanted me to hang out with him, but I didn’t want to be anyone’s olderbrother. But sometimes the emptiness of my room would get to me. Sometimes those four walls reminded me of a story Tom used to tell me about a World War II tail gunner who was a grandfather of one of the kids in his class. The tail of his plane was shot off by a German fighter pilot, and while the others in the plane went crashing down to the ground, the tail of the plane spiraled slowly down to earth, and so he stayed in the tail until he got close enough to jump out with his parachute. I don’t remember all of the details of the story except that Tom liked to retell it—he liked to imagine what it must have felt like to be eighteen years old and have time to think about how to save your life. Sometimes I couldn’t get that story out of my head, and the more I tried to think of something else, the more difficult it became until finally I would have to leave my room and join David, who was usually playing video games or watching TV. I watched a lot of films with David that year. We became experts in all the James Bond films. Sometimes when David and I shared a TV dinner together, he would pick a Bond film and challenge me to recite entire scenes from it. I attempted an English accent—one that I imagine was quite terrible, but to David it sounded like the real thing. Back home my friends and I used to watch a lot of funny shows like The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live . But I didn’t watch many of those in China because David didn’t get the humor, and I don’t know why, but I never enjoyed watching those shows by myself. I think it’s because I had no one to laugh with.

八
    On the fourth morning I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. It was my father, who said he was calling with good news. I thought for a second that he was going to tell me that he had changed his mind and that he was sending me to Laver. But the good news was that I had passed the trial for the Beijing team. I wouldn’t be able to play tournaments, but I could train with them every day. I thought