The Middle Kingdom Read online

  Jody looked up and called ‘Minmin!’ – his name for her – and then ran up to her leg and seized it. Xiaomin was pale and drawn and her hands were shaking, but she bent down and smoothed Jody’s hair while she greeted me.

  ‘You’re all right,’ she said. ‘We were so frightened. And the baby …’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘He slept for most of our bike ride in.’

  She smiled at that. ‘You’re fine,’ she said. ‘You’re both fine. And the students?’

  ‘They’re all right,’ I said. ‘Some soldiers came to the campus earlier this afternoon, but almost everyone was gone by then. And then I thought I’d better come find you. I wasn’t sure you’d be here, I was afraid you’d be at home …’

  ‘I’ve been here with Meng the whole time,’ she said, and then she spread her hands in the air and turned them over and back, as if they were chickens at the market. ‘I assisted him,’ she said. ‘All the wounded people – he cut and I held what he told me to.’

  In the sun her hands looked transparent. ‘Have you slept?’ I asked.

  ‘A little,’ she said. ‘Not much.’ She looked down at Jody, who was fiddling with the hem of her pants.

  ‘I brought our notebooks,’ I said. ‘And the drafts of the papers. What do you want to do with them?’

  In the distance we heard a single sharp pop, which might have been a truck backfiring or another gun. ‘What does it matter now?’ she said, but when I dug them out of my sack she took them and pressed them to her chest. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But the important thing, the important thing is to get you out of here. Thank God Zaofan is gone.’

  We looked at each other then, and Jody looked up at us. Thank God indeed – Zaofan, Xiaomin’s oldest son, had left China in the fall of 1986, and that was what Xiaomin and I had said to each other the first winter he was gone, during the demonstrations that led to the downfall of Hu Yaobang. Those had involved a few thousand students, a handful of arrests, but both Xiaomin and I had been convinced that Zaofan would have been one of those detained. If he’d been here now, he might have been shot.

  ‘He called Monday night,’ Xiaomin said. ‘From Massachusetts. Our phone was still working then. He was frantic – he’d heard that some doctors from our hospital had been killed trying to rescue students from the square. And he wanted to know if we’d heard from you. And then he said he was coming back – you know how he’s been – and that I couldn’t stop him. I had to put Meng on the phone. Meng told him no. No, absolutely. He said Zaofan could help us more by staying there.’

  ‘I’ll call him,’ I promised. ‘As soon as I can. I’ll make him stay.’

  She picked up Jody and carried him down the steps and onto the grass, where she gave him a length of rubber tubing she pulled from her pocket. ‘You can call him from there,’ she said, knotting the tubing into a sling. ‘You can see him. You must go home.’

  A gentle breeze blew, carrying with it odd hints of burning rubber and gasoline. ‘This is home,’ I said. I had never meant to stay here forever – three years, Xiaomin and I had decided. Maybe four. Just until we finished our project and Jody was ready for school. But I had no intention of leaving now.

  ‘Zaofan begged us to come and join him,’ Xiaomin said. ‘I told him we might later on – what will be left for us after this? We have to stay now, at least until this is over. But I promised him I’d send you and Jody.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘We’re staying here. I can help.’

  Jody looped the sling around his foot and pulled against it. Xiaomin struck the railing with her hand. ‘You have to go,’ she said sharply. ‘Now. Already there were soldiers this morning at Jinguomenwai, firing into the air around the British and American embassies. Your embassy is evacuating everyone. You have to go.’

  ‘No,’ I said, and I glared at her stubbornly. We had never argued. We had disagreed over many things, most of them having to do with Jody: she’d been appalled at what I’d let him eat, and at my failure to discipline him; I’d been annoyed that she’d sent pictures of him to Zaofan. But even our disagreements had worked out. Jody was at least as healthy and happy as the other children in his nursery, and as for the pictures – that hadn’t been all bad. Zaofan had sent me a stilted, formal letter after he’d gotten the first one, congratulating me on Jody’s birth. I’d sent another back, thanking him and avoiding any explanation of Jody’s physical appearance. ‘I’ve given Jody my maiden name,’ I’d written. ‘Doerring – Jody Doerring. My father is pleased.’ And if Zaofan knew more about Jody’s paternity than that, he never pressed it. Since then, we’d kept up an occasional correspondence in which I described how Jody was growing and Zaofan described his adjustments to life in Massachusetts.

  ‘Think of Jody,’ Xiaomin said. ‘What if something happens to him?’

  ‘No,’ I said again.

  ‘You’ll hurt us if you stay,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll make things worse for us – I can’t afford to have an American working in my lab. And you can’t refuse me, not after all that Meng and I have done for you.’

  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 microclima
tes, 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.