by Jack Livings
She gave the jacket a weak shake.
“Do I need to take my donation back?” he said, wincing as he guided his other arm in.
“No,” she said, holding the jacket still. “You look weird when you make that face.”
“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy,” he said. “I’m going to the hospital.”
“Really?” she said, dropping her guard and turning toward him.
“To give blood,” he said.
“For your back?”
“Are you serious?” he said.
“No.”
“To donate,” he said.
She pondered this, then said, “I don’t have to, do I?”
“No,” he said. “You’re too young.”
“Oh, good.” She picked up the remote and skipped through the channels. “When is this going to be over? It’s just the same old rubble.” She was testing the waters and waited for her father to laugh, but he didn’t. “It’s been two hours already. Mama!” she called out into the courtyard. “What if the earthquake is still on tonight? What am I supposed to do about Lovely Cinderella?”
She cocked her ear and, hearing nothing, shouted, “Dad’s going to the hospital to give away his blood!”
“You don’t have to make it sound like a crime,” Yang said.
“Then why were you trying to sneak out of here without telling Mom?”
Gong came shuffling across the courtyard, moving as though underwater, every step weighted, a diluted, slow-motion replay of the actual event.
“Did you take pills?” Little Li asked her mother.
“I’m fine,” she answered, holding Little Li’s eyes for a moment.
“Okay, so he’s giving his blood away for free,” Little Li said, opening her mouth wide in an imitation of shock.
“Your father and the rest of the Revolutionary Guard,” Gong answered, turning to Yang. “Take off your jacket and sit down. Wait for them to issue a formal request and then you can get a little credit. You, of all people, running to the rescue. They’ll drain you and then a doctor will say they need a kidney and you’ll say, Where do I sign? Just wait for Old Gao to come around asking for volunteers. If you do it through her, maybe she’ll mind her own business for a week.”
They lived near the Forbidden City in an ancient hutong neighborhood. Most of their neighbors were Chinese yuppies whose boredom with the practical elements of communism, like work groups and neighborhood committees, was a source of wonder to Yang. He’d grown up in the countryside in the late sixties and early seventies, and as a child he’d pulled yams next to intellectuals sent down for reeducation. He respected the Party’s ability to whip citizens into a storm that could flatten everything in its path. These days, when a yuppie butted heads with the neighborhood committee over a plan to install a bathroom in his three-hundred-year-old home, he bribed a cadre in the municipal government who directed the committee to issue a variance.
The rest of Yang’s neighbors were foreign executives, Swiss and Germans who levitated above the quaint diktats of local governance. The neighborhood committee’s power, such as it was, had concentrated in seventy-five-year-old Gao Lin, a woman who had fought off real estate moguls and the municipal government when they’d tried to evict her from her house, a gold mine to whoever could sell it out from under her. None had succeeded, and her gate now bore a white plaque marking the house a cultural and historical treasure. Her family dead and gone, she was the last soldier encamped behind crumbling fortress walls. When she went out, she shuffled around the hutong like a shrimp on its tail, stopping to take note of infractions and issue tickets, which she pinned to her neighbors’ heavy wooden gates. She fined them for improper bicycle parking and for failing to sweep their entrance stones. She fined them for neglecting to report their neighbors’ infractions. No one bothered to pay the tickets or remove them, and when a breeze blew through the hutong, the papers rustled like leaves. The rain pulled them down, and she replaced them with tickets for littering.
She was hard as nails, and none of the Chinese left in the neighborhood would have tried to have her removed from her post. Even the municipal-level cadres were slightly afraid of her.
“When she comes around I’ll tell her I’ve already donated blood. They’ll give out certificates,” Yang said.
“She’ll talk you into giving another pint,” Gong said.
“Are you watching this?” he said, pointing at the television. “I’ll gladly give another pint.”
“Don’t have a heart attack,” she said. “We lost a clay pot and some flowers from the tree. This could have been a lot worse.”
By the time Yang got to the bus stop, the news had hit the evening papers, but most people were lost in their own thoughts and looked to Yang not unlike a bunch of unplugged televisions. At the hospital, he had to pay a scalper one hundred yuan for a ticket to cut the admit line and, once inside, he searched four floors before he found someone who could direct him to the proper department for donations.
When he announced his desire for his donation to go to Sichuan, the volunteer behind the desk, a young woman wearing heavy black glasses and a white paper nurse’s hat, told him that per regulation, all donations would be apportioned according to need. “Local injuries are our immediate concern,” she said. “People were hurt inside city limits and the suburbs. Fifteen people were injured on the Fifth Ring Road.”
What a robot, Yang thought.
“There’s real carnage down in Sichuan,” he said.
“There have been no reports of casualties.”
“Give me a break,” Yang said. “The province is a graveyard. It’s a disaster zone.”
“The central office for disaster response has issued no such statement,” she said.
“I’d prefer this donation should go to Sichuan,” Yang said.
“For the earthquake?” the woman replied.
“For the snowstorm,” Yang said.
“There’s no need for that,” she said sternly.
Yang sighed. He could keep arguing, which inevitably would cause the volunteer to leave her post for a break that lasted until he gave up and left, or he could acknowledge that the woman on the other side of the desk maintained unassailable power. “I understand,” he said. “The blood goes where it’s needed most. I just want to help.” He palmed a twenty and offered his hand. She looked up, and without pretense plucked the bill from it.
“It’s rare to meet someone as civic-minded as you,” she said. “I’ll ensure your donation goes to Sichuan.” She wasn’t much older than Little Li, and he took a hollow satisfaction in having bent her to his will.
He filled out some paperwork and she directed him to an exam table covered with green paper. An orderly wearing large silver headphones came and swabbed his arm, then slipped in a needle. “Relax and be cool,” the orderly said. “I’ll check on you in thirty.”
“Where’s everyone else?” Yang said.
The orderly pulled one of the cups away from his ear and said, “Whassat?”
“The other donors?” Yang nodded at the empty exam tables around him.
The orderly crinkled his brow and released the earphone, which snapped back with a muffled pop. He disappeared into the hall.
Yang lay back on the table. He’d grown up in a farming village, his only possessions two blue Mao jackets, one stuffed with cotton for the winter, the other without cotton for warmer months, and a family of wooden frogs that fit into the palm of his hand. In 1980, a migrant work program brought him to Beijing, where he bored holes in door hinges and small-gauge gears at a state-run metal-stamp factory. Twenty years later, he had become co-owner of the factory. He was worth twenty million yuan, but most of his neighbors assumed he was a schoolteacher with a patrilinear claim to his hutong house. This aggravated his wife to no end. They’d paid cash for the house. It put Gong in a murderous state of mind when a neighbor asked her husband about his employment and he ducked his head and chuckled like a mountain hermit. “Metals,
” he’d say, if pressed. She had given up trying to explain to him that to be rich was glorious and there was no shame in having means. Even total strangers felt a sense of relief and pride in the presence of success.
Yang looked down at the tube, dark, almost black with his blood.
His parents were still alive, and though they accepted his money, they wouldn’t move in with him. They were perfectly happy living like two turtles under a rock out in Xianghe. There was no way he and Gong could ever be so content in each other’s company. Someone would have to surrender first.
A while later, the orderly returned and with surprising care slipped out the needle, affixed a bandage, bent Yang’s arm up at the elbow, and placed a rice cake and a cup of juice on the exam table next to him. He picked up the blood bag and left without a word.
Yang was nearly home when he realized he hadn’t asked for a certificate to prove he’d donated. He gave it a moment’s thought and kept walking.
It was the first thing Gong asked about. She made a strained face before he’d had a chance to answer.
“There must be a name for it,” she said.
“For what?” he said.
“This psychological disorder of yours.”
“They were very busy. You should have seen the line. There was no time to fill out certificates.”
“Sometimes I think you go out of your way to oppose me.”
He peeled back the gauze to show her the petal-shaped bruise in the crook of his arm.
“Show that to Old Gao when she comes around.”
“What’s the big deal?” he said.
She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped herself.
“There’s no way to know how many were hurt,” he said. “How many children are dead?”
“Be quiet,” she said very softly, almost as if addressing a voice in her head.
“In the larger view, a pint of blood isn’t much, but it’s something,” Yang said. “It’s part of a philosophy of, well, compassion.”
“Don’t you dare say I’m not compassionate,” she said.
“I didn’t,” Yang said.
“Why don’t you show some compassion for your family before you help total strangers?”
“You have no sense of logic,” Yang said.
“And you do? You’d rather remain anonymous than do a simple thing I asked of you? How’s that logical? Could you have done one simple thing to make my life easier?”
“A certificate makes your life easier? Your life is hard?” Yang said. “Do you go hungry? Does Little Li cry because the stones cut her shoeless feet?”
“Stop making fun of me,” she said.
Yang shrugged, and he felt, high on the left trapezius, a seizure of the muscle exactly where the broom had struck it.
“I have to lie down right now,” he said.
“Did you even bother to ask for a certificate?” Gong said.
Oh, why did she have to ask? Yang thought. There was no point in trying to answer. Unanswerable questions led to evasions. He didn’t reply.
“Go lie down,” she said.
This was the standard procedure to preserve his back, which would cripple him for days if not accorded the proper respect. The method, part traditional medicine, part common sense, required him to lie perfectly still for hours, staring at the ceiling. Normally Gong would bring him the radio or read him a book, but two hours passed before she entered the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You better be,” she said. She set a steaming cup of water on the table and emptied a packet of Yin Qiao San into it. Yang’s nostrils flared at the scent, but otherwise he was still as a corpse. Gong lowered herself to the edge of the bed and leaned in, her lips on his ear. “Behave like a child and I’ll treat you like one.”
“Hm,” he said, closed his eyes, and reached up to touch her cheek. The thorny fist in his back clenched tighter. He could beat the pain if he drank the herbs and remained as still as possible. He gently laced his fingers together to form a bridge across his chest. In through the nose, out through the mouth. He tried to visualize old paintings of sleeping philosophers soaring out over vast canyons, borne up in their dreams by mystical forces, but the image of the mother digging in the rubble kept coming back to him. He stayed there until he fell asleep.
The next morning he awoke at dawn and slid out of bed. There was still a finger of pressure against his shoulder blade, but the silver wire of pain had left his body. Gong didn’t stir. Her lips were parted and her braids lay splayed out at right angles on the pillow.
The sky was pinking over the roof on the other side of the courtyard, and he stopped to look in on Little Li. Her sheets were in a pile on the floor, and she was strewn across the bed as though she’d crashed through the roof. Yang feared for what her life would bring.
He set out for the post office, stopping to pick up an egg-and-scallion crepe from a street vendor he knew, and still arrived before the doors were opened. Bicycle postmen streamed out of the alley adjoining the building. By the time the doors opened at eight, he was surrounded by a crowd of early birds balancing parcels in their arms. They all went inside together and assembled in a rough line, each one ready to dash for the window should this tenuous civility break down. In February the year before, the government had declared the eleventh of every month Queuing Day, an attempt to reduce the scrums that formed wherever people congregated to wait their turn at a window. It was May, and as the summer Olympics got closer, rhetoric had increased, and people did their best to satisfy the rules, but no one expected the newfound order to survive once the foreigners had gone home.
Only one window was open, and Yang kept eyeing a wooden table set up in the corner of the lobby. When it was Yang’s turn, he told the clerk what he was there for and she called into the back, then directed Yang to the table. Another postal worker struggled through a door with a steel voting box held to his chest. He crashed it onto the wooden table, the steel biting into the wood, the metal table legs scraping across the stone floor. The worker settled into the chair behind the table, sighed, and motioned for Yang to step up.
“Donations for the Red Cross?” Yang said.
The employee behind the table nodded mournfully. Yang wondered if he had lost relatives in the earthquake. Or maybe he’d merely gotten into character when his boss told him to man the donation box. Some people were like that. Given a chore, there was no limit to what they’d do to succeed. Yang had planned to give three hundred, but he stuffed one thousand yuan into the slot and left without a word.
While he’d been waiting inside, the PLA had erected three green canvas canopies on the sidewalk, each one bearing a poster-board sign with blood types. A young man in fatigues and a Red Cross armband ran up to him.
“Sir, what blood type?”
“I’ve just made a donation,” Yang said.
The young man narrowed his eyes. “Blood?”
“Money. To the Red Cross,” Yang said, pointing at the soldier’s armband. “I gave blood yesterday.”
“You gave blood yesterday?”
“At Beida. Beida Hospital.”
The soldier leaned in to Yang like a prosecutor trying to catch a witness in a lie. “At Beida Hospital?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Whole blood or plasma?”
“What do you mean?” Yang asked.
“Which did you donate?” the recruit said, his voice rising. “Blood or plasma?”
Yang wasn’t entirely sure, but he said, “Whole blood.”
“Good. You can donate plasma.”
Yang pulled up his sleeve to show the bruise.
Glancing down at Yang’s arm only long enough to confirm that it was, in fact, an arm, the recruit said, “You’re the picture of health. Why are you trying to wriggle out of this? Don’t you care about your comrades in Sichuan?” People were staring. Comrades? Who used that word anymore?
“Where do I go?” Yang said. The recruit grabbed his arm and pulled
him over to an officer in a lab coat, then double-timed it back to the sidewalk.
“Quite a trapper you have there,” Yang said.
“Blood type,” the lab coat said.
All business, Yang thought.
The lab coat had to stick his arm four times to get a vein, and by the time the needle was in, Yang was ready to strangle the stone-faced bastard. An hour later, he was unceremoniously dismissed, his right hand pressing a hunk of gauze to his arm, the left clutching a bean cake. He couldn’t stop yawning and his stomach was an empty pit, and he got in line at the nearest noodle shop. The TV was going in the corner: scenes of rubble, children’s backpacks, more footage of distraught mothers throwing themselves against blank-faced fathers. Yang tried not to watch.
A construction crew was hunched shoulder to shoulder around the shop’s flimsy linoleum tables. They parted to allow Yang a place without breaking the shoveling motion of their chopsticks. Yang nosed into his bowl.
The heat from the smooth porcelain warmed his fingers, and after he’d eaten most of the noodles, he began to feel more like himself. He wished someone would turn off the television, and he tried to tune it out as he ate, but it was hard to ignore. Then his phone began to ring.
“Better get it,” his neighbor said, smiling. “Might be the office.” Some other guys laughed. It was an offhand remark, but Yang understood its meaning, and it set his teeth on edge. The men sharing the table with him wore dusty canvas jackets with heavy gloves jammed into the chest pockets, and here he was in a button-down shirt and pressed trousers. But his arms were as sinewed as any man’s at the table. He made a fist. He could teach anyone there to operate a thirty-ton H-frame press. He hadn’t forgotten.
The phone stopped, then started up again.
“Sounds urgent,” the construction worker said.
Yang backed away from the table to take the call.
It was Gong. “Back’s better?” she said.
“Ah, it’s better, thanks.”
“Where are you?”
“On my way to work.” On a normal day he’d have been at the factory since just after dawn, plowing through production logs and calling customers.