“Film school, yeah. Documentaries.”
“It’s good?”
“Mmm, I guess so—”
“Your mother says it’s the best.”
“Oh. Then it must be,” I smiled.
My uncle laughed. He knew my mother’s ways as well as I did. I’m sure he’d been receiving letters over the years recounting in detail this or that milestone passed. My mother, the only one in her family to go to the States, felt driven to make the most of her opportunities. This had made her high-strung and nervous, while my uncle, though he had suffered through the Cultural Revolution like so many others, had fared better in a way, that’s what I thought. He had an assurance that my mother lacked. He knew Beijing was his world in a way that my mother could never feel New Jersey was hers. And he demonstrated this to me that very day, when he took me to his friend’s house. The friend was an old and favorite patient of his.
“You went there?” Jill was astounded when I told her later.
“Yeah. It surprised me, too, but going there, it was like, nothing different, you know? We drove over and they waved us through a gate and inside, I lost track, but way in, we came to this place, kind of hidden, and we stopped, and this kid came out and he said, ‘Uncle Liang, Uncle Liang.’
“He was just calling my uncle that, my uncle’s not his real uncle. Anyway, he ran up and my uncle said, ‘This is Mee-kee—as in Mickey Mouse.’
“ ‘Go get your cars,’ my uncle tells Mickey and they went off, the two of them. They disappeared all of a sudden and left me standing in the driveway, with the guards looking at me. They didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I just stood there. Lucky thing the kid came back. He had two cars now and he wanted us to race them. Remote control. He wasn’t real coordinated. I got bored. I was thinking about crashing my car into one of the guards just to see what would happen, you know? But that’s when my uncle showed up. And that’s when I met him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, it was him. I swear, the guy who took over from Mao. What do they call him, the paramount leader? He’s old, right? And short, real short.” I drew my neck into my shoulders. “Like his pictures, exactly. You remember how he looked visiting Jimmy Carter in the White House. Anyway, I said, ‘Sir,’ I didn’t know what else to call him. And he says, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ ”
“To you?” Jill was incredulous, “What for?”
“I’m telling you—because I brought him what he needed. Knee braces.”
“Knee braces?”
“Yeah. Made out of spongy cloth. You know, you wrap it round your knees and the velcro keeps it in place? It’s what you get from your chiropractor.”
“All right, all right—so then what?”
“Then he was happy. Because I brought him the braces. His knees have been giving out on him since the Long March.”
“Terrific. He was so grateful to you he patted you on the back and he said, ‘Good work, old girl.’ Was that it?”
“No, come on. He wanted to talk.”
“With you? About what?”
“Hollywood.”
“Hollywood?” Jill’s voice shifted a register.
“I’m not kidding. Really. He wanted to know how far it was from UCLA to—let’s see—Disney, MGM, and Steven Spielberg. Major studios. That’s what he had on this piece of paper. He just went down his list: how far to here, and here, and here. By car.”
“Bullshit,” Jill turned away.
“No, wait, wait. You’re missing the good part. The old man’s got a granddaughter, Mickey’s older sister. Well, this granddaughter is going to UCLA, see? That’s why the old man wanted to talk to me. Because his granddaughter is putting the squeeze on him. She wants to get rid of her bodyguard and get her own car. To make movies, she says. But the old man won’t give her a car. He says she’ll kill herself in it. Or use it to get drugs. Isn’t that something?”
I thought I had delivered a great story to Jill, but once she believed me, she got upset that I hadn’t talked to the old man about our film.
“You didn’t ask him for an interview?” she was appalled.
“Well, it’s not like I could,” I said.
“You were there.”
“Yes, but he set the agenda. He wanted to know about Hollywood. ‘Why do you need a Porsche to make a movie? What’s wrong with a Benz?’ That’s what he wanted to know. Not this,” I waved my hand at the pile of luggage we had waiting on the curb. We were loading our van for another day’s work. “He won’t give us an interview just like that,” I tried to reason with Jill. “Even if he is my uncle’s patient. He’s getting too old. He’s got other things on his mind. You have to be like a major network before—”
Jill walked off and boarded our van.
She wanted a face that told it all. I thought she had it, many faces. Big, fat, thin, and small. Over the weeks, Peter had given her a gallery of film portraits. He was truly a master of his medium. He didn’t light a subject so much as he found the perfect light to bring forth his subject, putting a peasant woman by her window, bright quilts behind her; sitting a famous general in a big chair, half his face falling into shadow, the other half swimming with his thoughts, in and out of watery sunlight.
Jill had all of this already in the can. But what she wanted was something we couldn’t give her. The way she saw it, the face that told it all had to be a particular face: the face of a very high Party official. It wasn’t enough that we had filmed bureau chiefs and the directors of cultural institutes. Old generals who had big houses in nice compounds with guards and drivers. These were not people to be sniffed at, but in Jill’s view, if they were retired or only figureheads now, they were not quite first-rank. What she wanted was someone right from the inner circle, someone who could get her through that red gate into the heart of things, into Zhongnanhai, where only the select lived.
“What about Chou En-lai’s wife?” I heard her say to Alice.
Jill spent the remaining days of our shoot huddled with Alice, usually in the front of our van. If she spoke to me, it was only to give instructions. Otherwise, she didn’t want to be reminded that I had met the biggest fish of all and let him go.
I spread my gear and myself across the back seat of our van. We drove through the alleys of Beijing. Gray walls. Curved roofs. I was coming face to face with my own history for the first time.
I thought: Jill had to stick to facts. That was the problem. She had to make this history credible. But not me. All I had to do was hold out my microphone and listen. Listen for the past to percolate up out of people. And it would come up, sometimes with more gas than I could accept; I used a beautifully pristine German microphone that easily picked up half-digested meals, ill-cooked thoughts. Can you say that again? I would have to interrupt to get it right, a clean recording. It was my job to stand watch over memory, roll my tape out before it like a red carpet. I didn’t have to worry about facts or truth. I could ponder other things. Things closer to my heart.
Like when we went to the village north of Beijing and interviewed the Liu brothers, the one who could walk but not talk, and the other who could talk but not walk. Two old guys we put in a cart and filmed as they took us around their village. From tunnel to trench to wall, Jill had to cover the sure ground, going from fighting the Japanese to shooting the local landlord. But me, I could step away for a moment. Catch the young man riding by on his bicycle, girlfriend on the back. She turns, her face ghost-white with astonishment, she is wearing the local make-up, garish, she turns too quick to look at me and throws her young man off balance.
“Xiao Hung, Xiao Hung,” he cries as their bicycle weaves crazily down a rutted lane. White-washed walls on either side.
Jill had to get the big picture, but I could indulge in the small moments. Another day, our last day of shooting, we filmed the Songbird of the Party. She sang revolutionary songs for us. We filmed her in a hard, bright room, the glass doors to her bookcase jittering as a truck went by outside. I recor
ded her pure soprano; she was still quite youthful—black hair, lush lips—she had been only a young girl when she married a famous Party leader. He had passed on in the prime of his life. Of illness, Alice told me, not political intrigue.
I asked to use Madame’s facilities after we were through, and her guard, a raw country boy from the look of him, led me down a hall to a door where he stopped and averted his face. I opened the door and walked through. Inside, there was a realm of private indulgence I hadn’t seen in a long time: flush toilet—dressed the American way in something pink and fluffy—white bath, shiny faucets. There was a vase of flowers, plastic, by the curtained window. And a bar of soap, pink Dove, in a green soap dish. The towels were fresh.
Jill had to ask the Songbird about Yenan, the famous communist base in the Northwest, the one where many romances started and the one from which an ardent generation launched their final drive to power. Jill had to ask the Songbird about this, and then about her propaganda work. How she had spread the revolutionary message and advanced with the army as the communists swept to victory. We had come now, in the film’s journey, to the end of the civil war, and Jill needed to march straight through to her conclusion. But I, I would have said, after I saw the oasis of the Songbird’s bath, I would have said, “Tell me, madame, about your husband. I heard he was handsome, and apart from being a very reliable administrator, he was also a great ham and loved to write skits.”
If I dared, I would have said this, for where Jill had to be high-minded, I loved the low ground, the things that people pushed offstage, the gossip, the dirt. I was looking for the heart, the trashy heart of my history. After all, wasn’t that where the unknown leaped out at you?
When I returned to Beijing some years later, I went back to the red wall and sat, waiting for something, I couldn’t say what. I saw a girl and a soldier flirt over a popsicle. When they ran off, I waited through the afternoon and watched the light turn rosy, then gold. Soon it dropped to an afterthought and the old men went away, the checker players, too, the clerks in their white shirts, the visitors from out of town. When all had left and the city went dark, with only the dimmest street lights remaining, I walked around the wall.
Jill had finished her film and seen it broadcast to good reviews. Then Tiananmen came. And it seemed no longer possible to remember the past, except for the blood it left behind.
The revolution we had filmed, the old people we had talked to, they seemed as remote now as if we, the filmmakers—foreigners, no less—had made them up, their stories and their faces. As if we had written the script, cast the characters ourselves: “Landlords, anybody want to be a landlord?” And then directed the whole thing, badly at that.
“Mr. Mao, Mr. Mao, can we have you say it again?”
“The same?”
“Sure, don’t change a thing.”
(All rise) “Today, the Chinese People Have Stood Up.”
I walked through Tiananmen and around the Forbidden City. The night had drained all color away, the red of the imperial wall, the green of the trees. I moved through a grayscape. A small bridge opened to the left. I crossed a pungent moat below. The great wall in front. I turned at its base and walked down a narrow path, squeezed between the wall, which rose thick and black to my left, and a row of squatter tenements tottering at the edge of the moat.
Perhaps it was the night and the calm it induced, the feeling of people retreating into themselves, so many mashed into a tiny space along that strip of wall, every inch animated with people washing, gargling, eating a late bowl of noodles, pissing, yet all of this done as if under some kind of blackout, no one talking above a murmur, only a bicycle whirring past.
Perhaps it was this, the grayscape without hard edges, the calm before sleep, that made it possible to reclaim illicit thoughts, retrograde emotions. I walked along that wall, everything dark but for the man who came out in pale pajamas and read under a dim street light, but for the chess players in their white undershirts, everything dark but for the green smell of the squash plants, the beans, the flowers planted so densely along the base of the wall. I walked by and a nostalgia took over.
It had no meaning, really, except that for me, stranger to the motherland, walking along the edge of that ancient wall, along the memory of a great past, I wanted to be able to claim it as my own, not only to claim it, but to believe it was indeed a splendid story, a story of more than blood and avarice, a story worth passing on.
I remember I waxed as nostalgic as the moon that night. I came to one end of the wall, crossed the moat, turned, and continued down another side. There were no tenements now, but bushes and trees planted along the moat.
I walked on imagining my history until I noticed the bushes I passed seemed to be taking on a life of their own. They shook, more than necessary—there was no wind. Then I noticed bicycles parked by the bushes, and here and there, I saw a bush that had acquired a limb, usually shod, and trembling. Soon I noticed the biggest bushes had motorcycles, not bicycles, as if some Darwinian law had decreed the biggest and best bushes got the biggest and best wheels. In this case, Suzukis.
What I saw walking along the wall was nothing grand and enduring. Just couples making out. Some law of perverse logic must have said that bushes grown luxuriant with leaves by day had to give shelter by night to couples with no other place to go, couples desperate to develop a people’s history and pass it on to new generations. It was weird. A just exchange. The night’s maneuverings stripped away my illusions, and in their place, what did I have? A little hot romance?
Was this why I went to the red wall each time I returned to Beijing? Like a camel to its oasis, a horse to its watering hole, maybe I first sought out that wall, drank in its splendor, rested in its shade, just so I could wait for a moment like this, suddenly, to claim me.
I came to the end of the wall. A tower hung over the water, a moon over the moat. Far away, there were firecrackers. It was the seventieth year of the Communist Party. It was a night made to hunt for love and history.
DOCTOR
Christina Chiu
My first year out of med school, I started working at an eating disorders clinic on the Upper East Side. I was twenty-six, a recovered bulimic, understood the nature of the disorder, and felt that I could make a difference. One of my patients, Laurel, came to us weighing eighty-two pounds. She was five feet, five inches tall, and her sixteenth birthday was in a month. Despite twelve days of treatment, she’d lost another two pounds. Her pulse was down to forty-two beats per minute: her blood pressure 80/50. She had an arrhythmia, which put her at risk for heart failure.
Laurel was my last patient before the weekend. She had come to me through Ma’s friend Mary, who was the girl’s aunt. I knocked at Laurel’s door. “It’s Dr. Wong.”
“One sec,” she called. There was a rustling sound and the sharp squeak of bedsprings. “Okay!”
I opened the door. Laurel’s cheeks dipped inward, the bones protruding against her taut skin. Her face was flushed. Droplets of perspiration showed over her lip and throughout her thinning hair. Her nostrils flared.
CHRISTINA CHIU is the author of Troublemaker and Other Saints. She is the recipient of the Asian American Literary Award, the Robert Simpson Fellowship, the Claire Woolrich Scholarship, and the Van Lier Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Tin House, The MacGuffin, and the Asian Pacific American Journal. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University and her B.A. from Bates College. She was born in New York City in 1969.
Sit-ups again, I thought.
I noticed the fishbowl on the table beside the bed. The bowl contained a lone orange-and-black fish and a miniature white castle. The goldfish circled, searching the glass for a way out.
“Cute fish,” I said. “Your mom bring it?”
Laurel shrugged. She was propped against a bunched-up comforter, her legs crossed and a foot bobbing in the air. She was reading Romeo and Juliet. The cover of the book was torn, the pages stained
and crumpled.
Laurel whispered the sentences quickly, prayerlike, but with a passion that reeked of compulsion. The room’s thermostat was set at seventy-eight degrees, and condensation fogged the windows. She wore a red woolly cardigan, a T-shirt, jeans, and thick athletic socks. The sweater hung from her gaunt shoulders.
“Does it have a name?” I asked, looking at the fish.
She gave me an eternally bored expression. “Yu.”
I laughed—in Chinese, yu means “fish”—and Laurel’s eyes darted up at me. There was a moment of recognition: Oh yeah, she’s Chinese, too. She smirked; I was on the in. Finally, I thought, a connection.
“So how was the visit with your mom?” I asked, taking her pulse.
She shrugged again, shook her leg. “Same. Worried sick, blah, blah.”
“Did you ask for something for your birthday?”
Laurel squinted at the fish. “She’d just say no.”
“There’s no harm in asking, is there?”
“You don’t know Mom.”
My nostrils tickled. My attention was suddenly drawn toward a corner of the room. One whiff, another. It was rancid food. Laurel’s eyes darted from me to the bureau, then back to me. Her foot went still. “A dog,” she stammered. “That’s what I want.”
I acknowledged her with a nod.
“A German shepherd,” she said, clenching my hand. For someone so frail, she caught me off guard with the force of her grip. “But Mom’s all like, ‘Gain a few pounds first, and then we’ll see.’ ”
I freed myself from her grasp and moved toward the bureau.
“Don’t go in there,” she said. “It’s private.” The panic in her voice made me want to take her in my arms, cradle her thinning bones to my body. You have your whole life ahead of you, I wanted to say. A lifetime of experiences to live for. But I could remember the terror. The chaos. Every moment painful and all-consuming.
“I’m sorry, Laurel. You know the rules.” I opened the drawer. She quieted as I unraveled a towel filled with carrot bits, biscuit, browning lettuce, and rancid chicken.
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