Inscrutable of the gradual stairs: When did the Chinese devise this method of pitching their stairs so much more gradually than Western ones? I’m forced to take them one at a time, slowing me down when I’m in a mad rush to go nowhere, as usual…
Inscrutable of the cab honking: What are those cabs trying to say as they each honk an average of sixteen times per minute? Do they really think they’re going to change my mind if they’re driving on a one-way street in the opposite direction from where I’m walking, that I’ll say, “Oh, you’re honking so well I guess I’ll go your way instead?”
Nevertheless, I’m acclimating. Now that I’m going to be living with it awhile, I have to admit that the pollution here truly is breathtaking. Beijing ’s vaporized Frappuccino was impressive, but this is something to stand in awe of. Championship-level pollution. Olympic-stature pollution. An ivory-gray effluvium stops your vision after two blocks out or five stories up. What’s worth seeing beyond that anyhow? Probably just more power pollution. It’s amazing how quickly you adjust to not being able to make out the tops of buildings. The pollution is more than a by-product; it’s a being in its own right: a living, heaving consciousness-like walking around with an old lady attached, her toothless gums clamped around your nose. Inspiring, in a way: Breathers feel, “If I can do this, I can do anything.” So I will adapt, too. My old-fashioned allergenic American prissiness is a thing of the past. I’m tubercular with confidence, convinced we’re going to succeed in our mission.
I’ll figure out my lodging later; right now I’m taking in the city. It occurs to me that Shi may be a glossy city, Shi may even be a spotless city, but our section is neither-sort of like the outer reaches of Queens. Unlike Beijing, all tricked out for the Olympics, Shi is old-time China. The taxis are not on their first coat of paint, as in Beijing. The bikes are not the streamlined kind you see in BJ; they’re the kind your mother had in junior high, with three gears and rusty chains. The residents are not yet self-conscious about grooming themselves in public. On the other hand, there are plenty of places to relieve yourself. Ducking behind a cluster of weeds wouldn’t be out of character almost anyplace in this section of Shi. Helps keep down the dust, too.
And the smell! The smell is another presence, like the pollution, an entity that lives its life while you live yours. In the dull smogshine, the smell is like dried seaweed packed into the tops of your sinuses with wooden chopsticks. Seaweed with a hint of old cat urine to it. Except it’s not cats. Time to admit: It’s human beings. Billions of human beings.
And the traffic! If the traffic getting to Shi was somehow brilliant, here in the city’s center it’s genius. Watching safely from the sidelines allows me to view it objectively, enough to drop all preconceptions of what traffic should look like. I know I’ve seen this kind of organized disorder before, but where? With starlings swarming ahead of a thunderstorm? With amoebas seen through a microscope, clumping together, then flowing forth again to ooze against its limitations?
No. What it’s really like: pedestrian traffic. After all, if a person is strolling on a crowded sidewalk and something catches her fancy in a shop window, she’d think nothing of stopping, backing up a little, making her way over against the current of people. Nobody would get mad if she veered at a right angle or lunged ahead if the shop looked like it was about to close. So it is with the car traffic here. They’re not drivers, they’re motorized pedestrians.
Once you crack the code, even the gridlock makes sense. It’s less a vehicular traffic jam than a jam of people who happen to be in cars. People jockeying for position, nudging their way across the flow, pressing forward or backward by small degrees. And for all that, there are very few accidents, just as you rarely see pedestrians getting into accidents with one another. Drivers are so free to drive as they like that they’re free to avoid crashing, too. At home we’re in our straight and narrow lanes, so when an accident looms, our options are straight and narrow as well. We can steer to avoid it, but we’re so stiffened by habit that we lack flexibility. When a Chinese collision looms, the drivers are more creative in their escape tactics, even if that involves a sidewalk or two. Freeform driving allows for freeform avoidance.
It occurs to me that the way we got Larry to where he is now has worked a lot like this Chinese traffic. We’re adapting to the native credo: Stay loose. Find your own way. Don’t merely think outside the box; bust the box down, baby!
Lifting my hand in a flood of taxicabs, I’m instantly engulfed. To test their skill, I refrain from moving my feet until the last minute to see how close they land. The one closest to my toes happens to be a pedicab, like a rickshaw on a bike, so I climb aboard. Here’s the conversation the pedicabbie and I have on the way to the supermarket.
Hey, how’s it going?
Not bad, you?
Can’t complain.
So where do you want to go?
Anywhere I can get some groceries and housewares.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean.
How about you just pedal around a bit and I bet we come across it.
Okay, but aren’t you worried about getting wet? It’s starting to drizzle.
Nah, I’ll be fine. Ho, those folks are coming out of that building with grocery bags. Can you pull over?
The preceding was conducted entirely in party language, not a word exchanged. And that Foreign Service guy at the Beijing temple thought I needed to speak Chinese…
TOP TEN SIGNS YOU’RE IN A CHINESE SUPERMARKET
10. Chicken bones on the broken-tile floor.
9. Where the broken-tile floor is still underwater because of last week’s rainstorm, you’re walking on wooden pallets.
8. Parents hold their baby daughter over a wastebasket so she can pee.
7. The rolls of toilet paper on sale are so insubstantial they could handle two toilet incidents, tops.
6. In the bathroom someone blows his nose directly into the toilet while someone else, ow my God, did he just spit in his palms to rinse his face?
5. You take an elevator to the housewares department, but others push in before you can exit, and:
4. At least two of the others are smoking, and:
3. The other six are coughing with open mouths.
2. Since people keep cutting into the checkout line, it takes longer to pay than to shop.
1. But it’s worth it, because the soup you carry out in a plastic bag has an entire chicken foot in it-a hairy, liquid-bleached claw of your very own!
Larry’s horrified by the soup but pleased with the junk food, when I get back.
“Umm, Pringles, good,” he grunts-a caveman sound-and proceeds to leave a crunch zone of chips on the floor in a circle around him. But what’s this? The Mao playing cards I bought at the market with Jade, along with some of my toiletries, are all over the room. What’s going on? Where’s the suitcase I left in the corner?
“Oh, I couldn’t figure out who that belonged to,” Larry says, devouring the Ring Dings. “I put out everything with my stuff.”
Sure enough, all of our grooming products are mixed together on various surfaces around the room. His Fixodent with my sunscreen. His shoe spray with my Rogaine. His Bengay-isn’t Bengay for really, really old folks?
I go into housekeeping mode, filling up his larder. A Larry-type word, I realize. I lay out the provisions I’ve gathered, each one a distinct and hard-won victory. Pink polyester blanket. Two green plastic plates, bowls, cups. Vegetable peeler to skin questionable foodstuffs. It was easy to pick out foods he’d like: the worse, the better. Snickers. Twinkies. He’s on a restricted diet, can’t eat fruit or veggies, and studiously avoids the fried tofu and potato dumplings I got myself. Soon we’re both eating our supper and watching a TV movie on a Chinese station. A young Mao and his pals are on the march-the equivalent of our cowboy shows, with flat Mao caps instead of ten-gallon hats. You know it’s Mao because of the telltale wart; if they ever airbrush it out, China will have lost its soul. Before long the news comes on, sh
owing the occasional U.S. government official looking like a windup doll: cotton-white hair and seashell-pink skin.
“So how was your first day in the hands of the Chinese medical establishment?” I ask.
“Astonishingly good,” Larry says, firing a shot of eyedrops into each eye. “They put me on a handful of traditional Chinese medicines derived from the root of the rhubarb plant, which has been used for thousands of years because of its ability to suppress inflammation.”
“Since when did you go to medical school?” I ask, impressed.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’ve had a crash course the last couple years. I’ll put it in layman’s terms. Apparently, because of poor economic conditions these past decades, China had limited ability to do transplants or even dialysis until relatively recently. In its place, herbal therapies were used to treat patients like me with renal failure, with the common ingredient being the rhubarb root, given either orally, by injection, or by enema. To the latter, I say thanks but no thanks.”
It’s nice to see glimpses of the old Larry on top of his game. But I thought he wanted to stick with straight pharmaceuticals?
“I’m arcing,” he says with a shrug. “What can I tell you? You take the boy out of his condo and things change. At least I haven’t developed a hankering for bear bile, which is used by ninety-five percent of Chinese hospitals. But I can tell you that all the nurses on this floor know my medical history backwards and forwards. Plus, not once this whole afternoon has anyone missed my vein. All in all, I feel in much more capable hands than I do at home. If you were to ask my verdict after one day, I’d say American medicine has a lot to learn from these people.”
He takes time out from his little speech to sip his Fanta through a miniature straw. “By the way, not to complain, but next time could you pick me up some Raisinets, please? It’s how I get my fiber.”
“Wow,” I say. I sit back and look at him in wonderment. Go the soft speakers, Twinkle, twinkle, little star…
“Oh, say, and if you pass some Barbasol, can you pick me up a little-unscented, for extra-sensitive skin?”
“Sure, but you’re sort of on vacation here, Larry. You don’t need to be so scrupulous about shaving every day.”
“It’s one of my cardinal rules-to project a professional image, no matter where I am,” he says. “One last thing and we’re done: You’re getting your camera back tomorrow.”
“My camera? Did I lose it? Ow my God, did I leave it in the cab?”
“Relax,” Larry says, lifting one cheek to release a purring noise from his posterior and flicking back the Mao movie all in one move, a pretty athletic maneuver, given the variables. “While you were out, Cherry said he called the hospital to say he found it behind the backseat.”
“Who did? The kidnap cabbie?”
“If that’s what you insist on calling him. I’m not convinced that’s what he was. On reflection, he may have been sharing the route with his friends in that other cab, but they decided against it when we made a fuss. Maybe that’s what all the ‘friend’ talk was about. What do we know?”
“But he has my camera?” I ask. “It must have fallen out when I was stashing my passport.”
“Said he’s sorry, but he can’t drop it off till tomorrow. Has to go back to Beijing to get another round of passengers. So much for him being a kidnapper.”
He’s right: I was foolish to think we were being kidnapped. But here’s the thing: I give myself full permission to play the fool when I travel. The way I see it, if you can’t be willing to do that, why venture out of bed? Besides, I want to seize this clearheaded mood of Larry’s to ascertain some basics about his condition.
“So just to fill me in on some fundamentals,” I say, “do you have one working kidney or none?”
“None.”
“And when they get you a transplant, presumably you’ll be all right with only one?”
He’s plainly bored by my questions, making no effort to suppress a yawn. “As long as I avoid tackle football,” he says, lifting the other cheek.
“Do they take out the old ones or what?”
The blankness of his Mona Lisa smile makes it clear he’d like to watch TV in peace. “They don’t bother. They just push everything aside and plug in the new one.”
“There’s room?”
“If not, they’ll take out the gallbladder or something.”
“Is nothing nonnegotiable in this world of ours?”
Larry does little to help me expand the discourse or make me feel at home in his strange, pastry-smelling proximity. Instead he anticipates my next question to cut me off at the pass.
“Relatively simple operation, easier than for the donor, apparently. So long as they don’t drop it in with chopsticks, I have no complaints.”
From the hallway outside the room comes the squeak of nurses’ shoes skittering by, the scuff of patients’ slippers shuffling sadly behind their silent IV cranes. At street level a truck passes by sounding like a helicopter, its engine so defective we can make out its whop-whop-whop through our single pane picture window nine stories up. On TV they’re advertising a beauty cream you rub on top of your breasts to enlarge your bosom. Flat-chested women wearing expressions of scowling deprivation have no luck flagging down taxis, while a full-figured gal wearing an expression of satisfied happiness has great luck. What’s her secret? We see her in the privacy of her boudoir, where she’s applying beauty cream to the top of her chest. The beauty cream draws fat cells, represented as fizzy bubbles, up up up from the abdomen, where they do no good, to settle in the pleasing bosom area. And that’s all there is to it. A twofer: The fat cells leave an area where they’re not wanted and congregate in an area where they are wanted. Why didn’t Larry think of that? Now the formerly flat-chested women are able to snag all the taxis they could ever need!
“Anything else I can get you tonight?” I ask. “Shall I see if I can hunt down some Halloween candy, Alka-Seltzer, anything?”
“It’s getting late,” Larry says, peering at each wrist in turn, where his watches were before he misplaced them again. “Hadn’t you better find yourself a hotel room or something?”
Kind of embarrassing, to be invited out of the hospital room by the patient. It reminds me of the time my mother in the nursing home said she was seeing too much of me. But anyway, I’m a free man in China, free to hump my suitcase down eight flights of stairs to the lobby, empty as always except for a couple of stern Middle Eastern-looking men idling through, carrying badminton rackets. Outside, the sidewalk culture is booming in all its low-tech multiplicity. Residents unfold their sling chairs to watch TV, play cards, weld auto parts, scissor noodles, get a trim around the ears, practice calligraphy with fat water-filled brushes on the asphalt, or enjoy what appears to be the exquisite bliss of ventilating their socks. The air is by turns delicious and putrid.
When I get to the lodging Cherry has recommended, I find it a very proper hotel in a sylvan glade. Quiet, safe, and utterly unacceptable. I want noise, strife, peril! Now that my expense account has expired, I also want one with little Styrofoam cups for coffee instead of exquisite china with lids. I want fake wood laminate and cheap broadloom to cover a multitude of sins. I want to feel I’ve come down in the world, meeting life on its terms, on the road! Of all the hotels I pass, my first choice is a clean Chinese chain hotel on a busy intersection smack-dab on the main drag, except it’s just beginning to be built and looks like it won’t be ready for six months. But wait, there’s a light on in the lobby…
“I’d like a window facing the street,” I tell the front desk.
They just dug the foundation a week ago, and already the second floor’s ready to rent while they work on the rest night and day. With its immaculate glass-and-tile lobby, it’s less a Mini-Mushroom than a Sinoized Super 8; I immediately dub it the Super 2, because it’s about one-quarter as fancy. It’s also old-school enough that I receive a carbon-paper receipt for my deposit and a quizzical look when I ask about gym fac
ilities. Perfect. The stern receptionist with an incongruous jabot indicates that I’m the first Westerner to stay there, then asks if I’d like to buy a flashlight in case of power outage. She’s having a special on matching chrome sets: two for about a buck. What do I look like-someone who can’t pass up a sale?
“Hello, room,” I say, making friends as I enter. It’s always been my habit to speak immediately to my hotel rooms, knowing from long experience that the first impression a room gets of you is the most important. “I’ll be your new roommate. If any state spies want to nab me for illegal transplants, I’d appreciate it if you’d trip them up long enough for me to make my getaway…”
It’s hot yet drafty. I remove everything from my pockets and drape my shorts over the chair, checking the coins out of habit from when I had a penny collection as a kid-you never know when a 1909 VDBS Lincoln might turn up. Opening the window wide, I get a full blast of the Chinese night music: car engines like tractor motors, the screech of bicycle brakes like just-run-over puppies, the deep plaintive call of street vendors like mating bullfrogs (“Brown cowwwww-uh? Brown coww www-uh?”), the up-close stuttering of pneumatic hammers in the hotel. All the commotion is a comfort somehow. Maybe because it’s nice to visit a culture that’s growing and isn’t so obviously hurtling down the tubes. Although it’s not really fair that some cabbies use siren-type air horns.
I park my laptop in front of the window and hook in. Immediately after the cascade of Microsoft tones, a riff that doesn’t seem at all discordant with the Chinese street melodies, I send Cherry an e-mail telling her where I’ve landed. “ Ping!” comes her response at once, telling me that the kidnap cabbie will meet me in the lobby with my camera at 9:00 A.M. sharp. I’m uneasy-a feeling exacerbated by the money-saving, low-wattage bulbs throughout the room. Then “ Ping!”-I have a new e-mail…from Jade.
Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China Page 15