Think of Jody, Xiaomin said. What if something happens to him?
No, I said again.
Youll hurt us if you stay, she said softly. Youll make things worse for us I cant afford to have an American working in my lab. And you cant refuse me, not after all that Meng and I have done for you.
Think of Jody, Xiaomin said. What if something happens to him?
No, I said again.
Youll hurt us if you stay, she said softly. Youll make things worse for us I cant afford to have an American working in my lab. And you cant refuse me, not after all that Meng and I have done for you.
And that was the one argument I couldnt refute. She and Meng had done everything for me: arranged for me to stay in China, found me work in Xiaomins lab, stood by me throughout my pregnancy and during my labor and then helped me through the awkwardness of registering Jodys birth when I had no husband. Theyd helped me buy a bike. Theyd taught me to find my way around the city. And, whether theyd meant to or not, theyd helped me discover how I fit into the world.
I owe you, I told her. I know I do. But dont make me repay you like this.
I cant let you keep Jody here, she said. Hes 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 couldnt 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 others eyes as they drafted statements couched in a rhetoric theyd worn out decades earlier.
Wenwen and the others, I said to Xiaomin. Whats going to happen to them?
I dont know, she said. But the old men cant last much longer, and the rest of us will still be here after theyre gone. You have your passport? And Jodys?
Theyre in my pocket, I said. I didnt think I should leave them in my room.
Thats all you need. Ill send you the rest later.
I was going, then. To the embassy, to rooms full of people I didnt 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 Id done with her. But then I heard Zillahs voice, as clearly as if she stood there on the steps.
Dont 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. Hes operating, she said. You cant go in. Hell understand.
When I rose she put Jodys 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 Id 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, Dont worry. Ill see you again.
I knew she was right: that for the rest of my life, shed be with me wherever I went. Ill 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, Ive 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 Im 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 HospitalsTHE 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. Shed 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 doesnt sound like her, but maybe its 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.
Dont put your elbows on the table.
Sit up straight. Hold your stomach in. Dont 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 shed 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 Zillahs life instead. Zillahs voice, all that Zillah had dreamed and thought unreeling inside my head; Zillahs family, Zillahs home, Zillahs 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 elses skin. And then she left.
I lost Zillahs voice as soon as my fever broke, and I didnt 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. Id cried from Boston to Chicago: I was afraid of planes, I hated to fly. From Chicago to Seattle Id 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 Id sat in a tranquilizer haze, trying to smother my terrors with facts.
I lost Zillahs voice as soon as my fever broke, and I didnt 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. Id cried from Boston to Chicago: I was afraid of planes, I hated to fly. From Chicago to Seattle Id 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 Id 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 Zillahs voice came back to me. The flight attendents wore blue pants and tight-buttoned jackets and open sandals, and because they couldnt 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 didnt recognize her at first. I jumped and looked at the cabin attendant, wondering where shed 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 Id 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 planes rear door and make sure the seal was set, I took another pill and then I heard Zillah again.