The Middle Kingdom

And that was the one argument I couldn’t refute. She and Meng had done everything for me: arranged for me to stay in China, found me work in Xiaomin’s lab, stood by me throughout my pregnancy and during my labor and then helped me through the awkwardness of registering Jody’s birth when I had no husband. They’d helped me buy a bike. They’d taught me to find my way around the city. And, whether they’d meant to or not, they’d helped me discover how I fit into the world.

‘I owe you,’ I told her. ‘I know I do. But don’t make me repay you like this.’

‘I can’t let you keep Jody here,’ she said. ‘He’s all we have.’

And so there we were. She sat down on the grass beside Jody and pulled me down beside her, and then she traced an imaginary map on the grass with her finger and explained how I should slip through the alleys to the back side of the diplomatic compound and the door to the American embassy. ‘Turn here,’ she said. ‘And then here.’ She couldn’t look at my face.

‘How can I go?’ I said. Somewhere, I knew, Jianming was on a train or a truck, heading for Changsha. Wenwen was searching the city for her brother; parents were searching the morgues for the bodies of their children. People hid in their rooms and prepared to pull into themselves again, shuttering their eyes, closing down their faces. Chinese students working abroad faxed photographs and articles across the air to machines here, any machines, hoping someone might pick up the messages. In Shanghai, a bus was on fire. In secret buildings in the Western Hills, the old men who ruled China huddled together, massaging their legs and avoiding each other’s eyes as they drafted statements couched in a rhetoric they’d worn out decades earlier.

‘Wenwen and the others,’ I said to Xiaomin. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But the old men can’t last much longer, and the rest of us will still be here after they’re gone. You have your passport? And Jody’s?’

‘They’re in my pocket,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think I should leave them in my room.’

‘That’s all you need. I’ll send you the rest later.’

I was going, then. To the embassy, to rooms full of people I didn’t know and had avoided during my stay; to a bus full of terrified tourists eager to flee this alien place. To a plane, to Hong Kong or Tokyo, across the ocean: home. What had once been home. For a minute I thought of Zillah, my first, lost friend, and I wondered if I was repeating what I’d done with her. But then I heard Zillah’s voice, as clearly as if she stood there on the steps.

Don’t confuse the situations, she said.

‘Juice?’ Jody said, looking at me expectantly. It was time for his snack and his nap.

‘Let me say good-bye to Meng,’ I said to Xiaomin.

She shook her head. ‘He’s operating,’ she said. ‘You can’t go in. He’ll understand.’

When I rose she put Jody’s pack over my shoulders and then picked him up and dropped him in. ‘You have a good trip,’ she said to him. ‘Remember your Minmin.’

‘See you later,’ Jody said. ‘Alligator.’

Xiaomin had been in my room when I’d taught Jody that phrase; she loved to hear it and Jody loved to say it, because it always made her smile. She smiled now, and then she said to me, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.’

I knew she was right: that for the rest of my life, she’d be with me wherever I went. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, and then we both ran out of words. As I wheeled my bike away from the steps, I turned and saw her watching, the breeze blowing her graying hair away from her face.

II ENTERING CHINA

SEPTEMBER 1986

PATIENT: Doctor, I’ve come to you because I think I have a strange disease.

DOCTOR: What is it?

PATIENT: I have been afraid of noise and strong light for two years. When I’m exposed to these, I feel tense and restless.

DOCTOR: Do you have other symptoms?

PATIENT: Yes. At times I suffer from palpitations and shortness of breath. I sleep poorly and am troubled almost nightly by frightening dreams.

DOCTOR: What sort of dreams do you have?

PATIENT: They are different. For instance, once I dreamed that I fell down from a precipice. On another occasion I was chased by a wolf, and in other dreams I have lost my way in a desert.

—adapted from A Dialogue in the Hospitals

THE FRAGRANT HILLS

We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results.

—Mao

WHEN I WAS nine I had scarlatina, which was something like being boiled alive. A huge burning fever. Scalded skin. And a delirium so deep that, always after that, I believed in the possibility of another world.

My mother packed me in ice every few hours to knock my fever down, and afterward she never tired of recounting her trials. In a room full of friends and relatives she would draw me to her, stroke my head, and describe my rigid and trembling form, my burned lips and my rolled-back eyes. She’d tell how she had labored over me then, cooling, stroking, soothing; for years she drew on that capital, reproaching me each time I failed her with tales of her sleepless nights.

Maybe she stayed awake all those nights. Maybe she kept me alive. That doesn’t sound like her, but maybe it’s true – all I know of those lost days is what she told me. All that remains of my own from then is a memory of the voice that came to visit my head.

Eat your peas, the voice said at first. My mother, inside my skull.

Don’t put your elbows on the table.

Sit up straight. Hold your stomach in. Don’t bite your fingernails.

I had caught the fever from a girl named Zillah, who lived in the projects by the riverside and who had the habit of making whole worlds out of pebbles and feathers and pinecones and rice. She laid these out on the sand at the base of the gravel pit, where we were strictly forbidden to play, and once she’d finished we peopled the streets and spaces with the beings we saw in our heads. Stones that grew out of the earth like trees. Trees that sang like birds. Stars that wept and talking dogs and wheat that acted with one mind, moving like an army. I was forbidden to play with Zillah, but she drew me like fire and when she got sick I followed her right in.

She died. I lived. And on the night she died, the voice that had nagged me throughout my fever – low and trivial, admonitory, hardly a voice at all – took a sharp turn and started bringing me Zillah’s life instead. Zillah’s voice, all that Zillah had dreamed and thought unreeling inside my head; Zillah’s family, Zillah’s home, Zillah’s plans for our lives. She gave me a glimpse, when I was too young to understand it, of what it was truly like to inhabit someone else’s skin. And then she left.

I lost Zillah’s voice as soon as my fever broke, and I didn’t think about it for years – not until the fall of 1986, when I was on the last leg of a long journey from Massachusetts to China. I’d cried from Boston to Chicago: I was afraid of planes, I hated to fly. From Chicago to Seattle I’d slept. Some hours out of Seattle, the stewardess had woken me to point out the glaciated wonders of the arctic waters below, and from then until we reached Japan I’d sat in a tranquilizer haze, trying to smother my terrors with facts.

I knew about China what any other earnest, middle-aged visitor might: rather more than a billion people lived there, elbow to elbow, skin to skin. Beijing lay in the north and its name meant ‘Northern Capital.’ Two-thirds of the country was mountain or desert or bitter plateau, unfit for cultivation; the fertile plains were often flooded and famines were as common as snow. The names of Mao and Deng and Zhou Enlai rang a bell with me; also those of Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kaishek, Marco Polo and Genghis Khan, the missionaries and the Opium Wars, the Taiping and the Boxer Rebellions, coups and terrors and insurrections, the Long March, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four, Democracy Wall, the Four Modernizations. I knew dates and proper names and phrases so worn they came dressed in capital letters; which is to say I knew nothing at all.

We flew from Japan to Beijing on a CAAC flight, and it was then that Zillah’s voice came back to me. The flight attendents wore blue pants and tight-buttoned jackets and open sandals, and because they couldn’t speak English they greeted us with a videotape instead. The picture was grainy and the background music wavered and crashed.

The English title flickered, pale and ghostly, along the screen: In-Flight Annunciation, I read. The annunciations I knew about were the sort where the angel Gabriel comes, pronouncements are made, preparations undertaken. Voices are heard and taken seriously.

Pay attention, Zillah said.

I didn’t recognize her at first. I jumped and looked at the cabin attendant, wondering where she’d found that English phrase, but she looked at me blankly and gestured toward the screen. ‘For complete personal safeness,’ the next line read, ‘all lap belts securely fasten please.’

I took the warning seriously. I fastened my seat belt so tightly I nearly cut myself in half, and still I was so scared by our jerky, hesitant flight that I added another tranquilizer to the pair I’d swallowed at the airport in Japan. When the cabin pressure dropped over the Yellow Sea and the crew rushed down the aisle to pound the plane’s rear door and make sure the seal was set, I took another pill and then I heard Zillah again.

Don’t worry, she said. You’re safe. Remember the day we tried to fly?

This time I knew who she was, and I acted accordingly. I shut my ears, I threw her out of my mind. I pushed her back to that place where I’d pushed everything for years. And I succeeded; we overshot the runway in Beijing twice, and by the time we landed I had driven Zillah away. That was how I existed then: push, shut, close, seal, deny, forget. Forget. My heart was a palace of sealed rooms and my mind was a wasteland of facts. I walked off the plane, shaken and limp, and entered a cold gray building dimly lit by unshaded bulbs. Men in green uniforms stood by the walls and stared.

I stared back. I had a phrasebook with me, full of sentences meant to be used in places like this, but when I looked at the words they seemed hopelessly strange. I turned toward my husband, Walter Hoffmeier, hoping that he’d take care of things. But Walter wasn’t there.

In the absence of someone to greet us Walter had taken charge of our group, lining us up, finding our baggage, assembling documents and patiently explaining who we were and what we were doing there. ‘International Conference on the Effects of Acid Rain,’ he repeated, enunciating clearly. The puzzled customs officials shook their heads. Fifty Western biologists, experts on the effects of acid rain, come to meet with a hundred Chinese biologists in a country with the worst acid-rain problem in the world. Walter had visions of international cooperation, economic reform, restored ecological balances; and behind him, like an army, stood synecologists studying woodland microclimates, ichthyologists studying trout, geologists mapping the bedrock’s differential weathering, and botanists analyzing ancient pollen, not to mention the limnologists, the entomologists, the invertebrate zoologists, and all those whom the Chinese politely referred to as ‘accompanying persons,’ but who were, with two exceptions, wives. Tired wives, our voices shrill with jet lag and the rocky flight.

Our dresses were rumpled, our hair was mussed. Eyes kept sliding toward us. I felt like a cross between a goddess and a whale – a goddess for my long, straight, pale-blond hair, which was streaming down my back in wild disorder, and a whale for my astonishing size. I’d gained thirty pounds in the past nine months and hadn’t been so heavy since I was sixteen. My arms quivered when I moved, and in that room full of short, slight men I felt as conspicuous as if I’d sprouted another head.

‘Any radios?’ the officials asked. ‘Any cameras, watches, calculators? All must come out which goes in.’

We listed our goods and promised not to sell them and cleared the last booth, and when we did we saw a small man waving a cardboard sign embossed with the name of our conference. We’d missed him; to our stupid eyes he’d looked like everyone else. He’d been waiting for us all along.

‘Liu Shangshu,’ the man said, pointing to himself and then pumping Walter’s arm. ‘You call me Lou, okay? I am assigned to you, from Chinese Association for Science and Technology. Your host unit. Anything you want, you ask me.’

And with that he herded us into a tiny bus and we headed for the Xiangshan Hotel in the Fragrant Hills. The hotel was half an hour northwest of Beijing, and I peered through the narrow bus windows as we rode into the city and out the other side, past block after block of concrete apartment buildings. Most of the roads had no streetlights and the city stretched dark and secret around us. The road narrowed to two lanes as we turned north, and the driver dodged platoons of bicycles that rose from the darkness like ghosts.

‘Five million bicycles here,’ Lou said, answering someone’s startled question. ‘Maybe six. Is crowded city.’

It was. We flew ignorant and air-conditioned through a dense mist of life, our headlights shining on horse-drawn wagons piled with hay and sometimes crowned with a tired person or two, small carts pulled by tricycles, rivers of people walking quietly toward unknown destinations. A man dangled a white goose from a basket on his handlebars. In the open back of an old truck, two camels stood placidly. The fields beyond the road were flat and planted with something tall, which might have been corn. Camels belonged in the desert, I thought. Corn belonged at home. I had no idea what belonged in China.

Farther out, the road was under construction, and men stripped to the waist stood shoulder-high in ditches lit by gas flares. Digging, lifting out stones, laying in drainage pipe – it was almost midnight, and when our bus passed by, the workers pointed and smiled and spoke to us. I pulled down my window to listen to them, but Lou reached over and pulled it back up.

‘Please,’ he said reproachfully. ‘Will be more comfortable with windows closed, air-cooling on.’

I got a whiff of the countryside and then it was gone. The road narrowed further and the traffic thinned as we entered the silent hills and finally came upon our hotel, which was white and set in a pool of light behind a tall metal fence. We’d been traveling for thirty-six hours and were frightened and weary and hungry and sore, and the sight of the glassed-in central atrium and jutting wings seemed pleasing at first, walling us off from everything. The night clerk was asleep when we entered, and the porters snoozed on straight-backed chairs. Lou moved like a sheepdog, herding us toward the desk.

My first week in China I saw almost nothing and misread everything I saw. I’d come reluctantly, although this trip had once been a dream of mine – events at home had left me sick and depressed and unreceptive, and it wasn’t until I first saw Beijing that something opened in me. Then I grew anxious to look, and then frustrated when I couldn’t; I couldn’t escape the hotel except in the company of Lou and the other wives. Around me were wind and dust and constant construction; pleated slipcovers that rendered the furniture female and squat; warm beer and flat orange soda and the thick smell of Chinese cigarettes; plants I couldn’t name and food I couldn’t recognize. Modern office buildings went up inside shells of hand-tied bamboo scaffolding: a picture any tourist might have taken; while inside a life I couldn’t imagine and yet yearned to enter went on without me.

Walter and his colleagues met with the Chinese scientists all day, every day, in a huge auditorium hung with banners and studded with microphones. He talked and arranged informal classes and paired his Western colleagues with Chinese scientists who had similar interests. He never left the hotel and I almost never saw him. I was packed in a minibus each morning with the other wives and taken on whirlwind tours of the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Mao Zedong Mausoleum; I never took pictures because the images were frozen on postcards everywhere. We spent an hour or two at each sight before Lou herded us into the nearby Friendship Store, where goods the Chinese wanted but couldn’t have were exchanged for our precious foreign currency. Outside each Friendship Store, men with hooded eyes slunk past us. ‘Change money,’ they whispered. ‘Change money?’ Our pockets were stuffed with the crisp colored bills called FEC – Foreign Exchange Currency, not really money but tokens that allowed us to shop in the special stores and stay in our special hotels. Real money was forbidden to us; Lou chased the black marketers away.

My thrifty companions bought jade and ivory and lacquer boxes as though there were no tomorrow, but the constant pressure to shop made us all short-tempered. Swiss, German, English, Canadian, American, Italian, French – the foul, polluted air of the city wore us down, and we wheezed and coughed and sneezed in grumpy concert. By the third day, I had a cold that quickly deepened to bronchitis, and something – maybe my rising fever – made me frantic with longing, tense with a desire I didn’t understand. Nine million people around me living wholly different lives, and each time I tried to talk to one of them, Lou hauled me away. He rolled up windows, shut doors, hustled me across roads. He interposed himself between the people and me, and when I complained to Walter, Walter shrugged my words aside.

‘Grace,’ he said impatiently, ‘this isn’t Massachusetts. You go out on your own and you’ll get lost or hurt or in trouble or something …’ He winced when he saw my face and then he spoke again quickly, hoping to distract me from what we both knew he’d meant: the incident in the swamp back home. My proven inability to take care of myself.

‘It’s tough out there,’ he said. ‘That’s all I meant. You don’t understand the language, and it’s a different world – at least it’s comfortable in here.’

But I was tired of comfort. We had comfort at home, comfort in spades, our lives as safe as soap, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in this swirling, gorgeous land lay the life I’d been looking for. I saw it in the children I glimpsed from the windows of our bus, who were so beautiful it pained me to look at them. I saw it in the old men airing their caged birds in the parks, in the girls holding hands on the street, in the students who crowded around Walter. I heard it in the Mandarin that I couldn’t understand, the calls and shouts and trills and whispers, the rising inflections that weren’t questions, the staccato barks that weren’t commands. I felt it in Zillah’s brief reappearance; she’d been missing for twenty-one years.

On our sixth night locked away in the Fragrant Hills, I made a break for it. After dinner, when all the scientists filed into the meeting room for another presentation and all the wives returned to their rooms, I walked out the front door of the hotel and into the surrounding park. Expecting an adventure – a chance meeting with anyone, an overheard conversation, a glimpse through the windows of one of the buildings that lined the bordering road. But the park was closed, the lights were out, and the only sound was the hollow beat of a horse’s hoofs on the packed dirt road. I crept through the shrubs near the locked gate, and I caught a whiff of damp straw, green bamboo, horse manure. When I heard voices, I called ‘Ni hau’ into the darkness – hello. Hello, China, I thought. Hello, anyone.

Two men leapt up, terrified, from the pillars they’d been leaning against. They were eighteen or so, boys in uniform, and their English was no better than my Mandarin. They looked at my hair; they looked at each other; they whispered furiously.

‘Where … from!’ one of them finally said.

I searched my mind for the words for our hotel and came out with Xiangshan fandian. The men whispered to each other.

‘Is un-allowed,’ the short one said, and then they politely, firmly, escorted me back. We had a small scene in the hotel lobby, where an embarrassed Lou vouched for me, and then I slunk off to bed in a storm of frustration.

Walter was furious. ‘I can’t believe you went out there alone,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to get hurt?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but I wasn’t and he knew it. I thought I remembered a time when he might have made the same journey himself. He probably thought he remembered a time when I would have clung closer to him. We lay in our separate beds, the sheets drawn tight as skin, and when I said into the dark silence, ‘You hate me because I’m fat,’ he sniffed and said, ‘I dislike the way you act.’ Which may have been true – we hadn’t made love in months, not since my last day tracking birds in the swamp back home, and in the absence of that connection we’d grown as strange to each other as a raven and a cat.

Our windows opened out to a dark garden arranged in stylized shapes: Pavilion Amidst Spring Greenery, Hibiscus on a Misty Hill, Azure Cloudless Sky. Somewhere a fountain murmured. The smells of trees and bark and wet stones drifted into our room, and in the silence I unwrapped a Hershey bar and fed my heart. By morning we’d decided we weren’t speaking to each other, and we passed burnt toast across the table without a word.

The next night, we marched in silence through the halls of a university on the outskirts of the city, past guards who checked our invitations and into a large, worn lecture room which the science students had hastily decorated. The room had the feel of a high-school gym set up for a senior prom: folding chairs set in uneven rows around the edges, banners draped over tables, streamers and posters tacked to the walls, a piano and some sturdier chain and a few microphones at the front. We were part of a small parade – Walter and me first, ignoring each other, and the others coupled behind us as if heading for an ark. Distinguished scientist, decorative wife, pair after pair; a few unmarried women linked for safety; one anomalous distinguished wife on the arm of her toymaker husband. Almost immediately Walter, guest of honor, was swept toward the front of the improvised banquet hall to be introduced to the Chinese scientists. I was funneled off with the rest of the parade. Chairs had been set for us amidst the sea of our Chinese hosts, all of whom seemed to be talking at once. A forest full of tree frogs, a classroom packed with cats; I couldn’t make out anything and the hot smoky air set me coughing again.

‘Ni hau, ni hau!’ said the people as we passed. Hello, hello. I ni-haued back as I had all week and managed a dui bu qi when I stepped on someone’s foot – excuse me. From the man’s startled expression I knew I’d mangled his language again.

Half of Beijing seemed crowded into that room, all of us ricocheting off each other. Feet trod feet, elbows bumped elbows, shoulders and hips and thighs mashed together, glasses crushed noses, jewelry caught sleeves. My sleeves, especially – I was wearing blue, a soft, heavy-weave cotton shift with dolman sleeves and a slit neck that set off my blue eyes and pale hair but could not conceal my size. I was the biggest woman there, and my vast, rippling bulk formed a dam in the river of guests. Chinese men bumped against me like reeds, stood puzzled in the eddy behind my mass, murmured apologies, moved away. I willed myself to stop streaming sweat and found a seat near the edge of our foreigners’ island.

There were three rows of people behind me and one in front. To my left, thirty or forty Chinese scientists whispered together. To my right, Walter sat on a raised seat, his shoulders high above a sea of dark heads. The scientists with whom we traveled were well-enough known, but Walter was the acknowledged leader of the acid-rain world and so the Chinese, sensitive to status, shunned everyone else in his favor. Walter was who they crowded around during coffee breaks; Walter who they introduced to their students and families. On the first day of the meeting they’d fallen silent when Walter stood at the podium in the lecture hall and explained, in his soft voice, how the sulfur dioxide from the coal-burning power plants was killing their lakes.