Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  Just beyond the rice fields, Zoe came to a sod hut where an old man sat smoking. “Do you know the woman with the blue eye and a sick little boy?” she asked. The man’s rheumy eyes opened wide at the sight of a foreign devil. He looked her up and down, but finally nodded, and pointed to the right.

  “Third house down the hill,” he said.

  At the bottom of the hill, along a dirt path, she found two houses made of white stucco that had grown muddy with age, each with rice-paper guardian demons draped across the doorways. Geese and chickens pecked out front. A woman was cutting noodles at a table outside the first house. At the second, black smoke from the chimney curled through the fog.

  She didn’t see the third house until she reached the very end of the path—a sod shack, the color of the soil and barely visible even close up. At the doorway, with no actual door in sight, Zoe peered in and saw the sick boy, lying on a cot beneath a filthy pink quilt and staring up at the straw roof. The interior was dimmer than the outside, but Zoe could make out a well-trodden dirt floor. A rough-hewn table stood against the rear wall next to a small iron stove.

  Catching sight of her, the boy screamed.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Zoe said in a soft voice, tentatively edging over the threshold. “I’m here to help you. How do you feel?”

  The boy screamed again, his eyes streaming yellow mucus.“Where is your mama?” Zoe asked.

  “My mama dead. Auntie there,” he whimpered, pointing toward the rice fields.

  Zoe thanked him and went off to the paddies, where she spotted the blue-eyed woman who had approached her at the hospital. The woman was sorting bales of straw from a wheelbarrow and throwing them onto the fields. A girl of about twelve or thirteen trudged a row behind, kicking up soil with her bare feet. She wondered if the village had stopped giving out boots and now the peasants couldn’t afford them.

  “Hello,” Zoe called out, trying to assume an I-just-happened-to-be-in-the-neighborhood sort of cadence. “I met you yesterday…”

  The woman threw down an armful of straw, then stopped to inspect the intruder, her good eye lingering on Zoe’s copper hair. “They say you’re a human rights activist,” she said.

  “Well… not really.”

  “A reporter?”

  “I’m here to write about the village.”

  “The Wall Street Journal? BBC?”

  Who said the peasants weren’t aware of the world? “You know Columbia University? In America. I am writing…a book. My dissertation.”

  The woman considered that, her mouth dropping in disappointment. “Why don’t you go into business and make money?” She coughed out a bitter laugh.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Not now. We have to work,” the woman said, and reached back into her wheelbarrow.

  Zoe turned away, thinking that maybe if she returned tomorrow they’d know she was determined.

  “Miss!” a reedy voice called out.

  The young girl had caught up with her.

  “My mother told me not to bother you. But I want to ask you something. I think you must be a nice lady.”

  “Thank you. What’s your name?”

  “Kwan Jing Yin.” The girl looked down. “My mother is Yu Li. She’s embarrassed, that’s all. Maybe she blames you, but it isn’t your fault. My father worked in the factory and he lost his job. The people who run the factory made everyone work even though they couldn’t pay any salaries. They kept promising that they would pay next month, then the month after that. Then, they said go, you’re fired. And now my father, he has gone…”

  “Where?”

  “He was demonstrating in the village, but they, y’know, the village committee, locked the workers up in the jail because they don’t want you to see him. What is your name, miss?”

  “Zuo Yi Au Tin.”

  “That is a pretty name. Are you a teacher, Miss Zuo Yi?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “Would you help me learn, maybe? I had to stop going to school when we didn’t have money to pay the fees. I used to make pretty good grades and I miss it so much. They took most of my books but…”

  “Who took them?”

  “Come now, please? I told my mother I won’t help cover up the soil. It’s the part I hate the most. It hurts my back to bend down with that heavy straw. I’m thirteen and I don’t care if my father beats me when he comes home. They know I won’t do a good job anyway.”

  And so it was that Zoe found herself spending the morning in the peasant hut, and promising to come back the next day.

  Ming frowned when Zoe told her about it. “It’s not safe there.”

  “But I have to…”

  “Be careful. Don’t take money with you,” Ming relented, finally.

  On her way out the next morning Zoe bought soap and towels and matches at one storefront on Market Street. At another, she purchased a big aluminum pot, and at another a plucked chicken, a cabbage, fruit, and some bean paste filled buns. The shopping left her with twenty yuan and some coins in her pocket.

  At the shack, the boy was coughing up phlegm, and Jing Yin sat on the cot beside him with a bucket. The little room reeked of sickness.

  “Oh, Miss Zuo Yi!” Jing Yin jumped up, smoothed her hair, and frowned at the spittle tracks on her shirt. “I’m so sorry…it was bad all night.”

  Zoe filled the new pot she’d brought with water from the pump outside, turned several knobs on the stovetop until she got a burner to light, and deposited the chicken in the pot to stew. Jing Yin ate some of the oranges, bananas, and buns. Even Jing Yin’s sick little cousin gobbled down a bean paste bun. When he finished eating, spots of color had blossomed on his pallid cheeks.

  “I wanted to do the homework but I was up with him.” Jing Yin looked longingly at her neglected books—three of them, stashed in a corner. “Can you sit a little while? Do you know the story of the Garden of Eden? Some people from a church came to my school once. I like that story.”

  As it happened, Zoe had often watched her grandfather, the deacon, conduct services for the children’s congregation and tell them about Adam and Eve. Stork Austin used to hiss like the serpent as he pulled an apple from his pocket. Zoe told Jing Yin and her cousin that a big bang in the cosmos created earth; she told them of the evolution of one-celled creatures in the ocean and the arrival of dinosaurs, followed by the apes. “Two apes woke up one morning and found that they’d evolved into a man and a woman,” she told the kids. She leapt like a creature reborn. “They realized they could speak, and they spoke to God, who told them their names were Adam and Eve, then plunked them up and sent them to live in a paradise with green trees and lots of flowers and fresh streams. But then one day Eve saw a serpent.” Zoe hissed the way her grandfather used to. “The serpent told her she should eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and then she’d see all kinds of amazing things that God didn’t want her to know about.”

  Jing Yin clapped at the end. “They say Sunshine Village was paradise once too,” she said. “I know a sad but beautiful story about the Handsome Monkey King.”

  Zoe listened, for the second time, to the tale of the Monkey King and his sweetheart. Except in Jing Yin’s version, Zenia died of grief.

  “She cried herself to death,” Jing Yin declared. “And they say her tears still fall over the village, which accounts for the constant rain and fog.”

  The girl had undeniable talent, Zoe was thinking, the makings of an actress or performance artist if she just had someone to train her properly. These days a peasant with ambition might be able to find her way out of Sunshine Village. Watching Jing Yin and mulling over what it would take to get her to a good school somewhere else in China, Zoe didn’t notice two figures at the doorway until the boy emitted a croupy shriek from his sickbed.

  Two young men stomped over the threshold. Both were slight of build but seem
ed to be forged entirely of iron. They wore only tee shirts against the cold, their arms warpainted with tattoos, their two faces like a double-barrel shotgun.

  Before Zoe had fully risen to her feet, one of the intruders came from behind and seized her breast with a tattooed hand. She jumped up and gave a backward kick to push him away, but he came at her from the front, with a switchblade pointed at her chest. He grinned and made a pantomime of slicing off one breast at a time. Zoe tried to sense a weakness in her opponent, but by then he had the knife pressed up against her chest. Her limbs and even her brain seemed paralyzed. She felt a rush of warm water, wetter than any celestial tears, and registered that she’d peed in her pants. Somehow she felt a thought return—and with a swift kick to her opponent’s groin, she sent the knife hurling to the ground. Grab it, poke his eyes out. But Zoe was shaking, and the other man seized it first, shoving her shoulder and forcing her to the ground. “Ugly bitch.” He ripped her pocket and the twenty yuan tumbled out. He seized the money, then sliced her blouse in one swift movement, the buttons bouncing onto the dirt floor.

  The man spat in the dirt. He looked at the buttons on the floor, glared at Jing Yin, and snarled, “pick up those and give them to me, girl.” While she was on her knees, pulling tiny buttons from the dust, he said, “You tell your mama you’re way short.” The other man surveyed the room, and Zoe watched him light upon the shiny pot on the stove. “Something brand new,” he snarled, then walked over and seized the handles without paying attention to the flame below. “Fuck!” he screamed as he threw the chicken and water onto the dirt floor, muttering something about the Kwan family burning his hands, as if it were their fault. They left with Zoe’s cash, the new pot with shards of Zoe’s blouse wrapped around it to keep from burning them more, and a can filled with rice.

  Jing Yin and her cousin huddled against each other on the bed, the boy’s face the color of ashes. Jing Yin’s lips quivered and Zoe saw rage building to a simmer on her thirteen-year-old face. “Go, please, Miss Zuo Yi. You can’t come back here. They’ll come after you again. You must be careful everywhere. They know you now.”

  “I’ll tell the police.”

  “They are police helpers. They buy houses here to make money from rent. They own our house and we can’t pay the rent so they take our TV and everything, even your buttons. They work for the police bureau part time. They know where my father is.”

  “Oh…god. What if I got you the money? A lot of money?”

  Jing Yin shrugged. “They always want more. They’ll be after you too.”

  Chapter Six

  The night after Ming vanished from New York, Danny invited Jeff over. Zoe plied the abandoned husband with single-malt scotch. The three of them gathered around Danny’s computer, and Jeff read aloud from a certain blog.

  “Sheeeiiitttt. ‘His cock had a curve like the crescent moon…’” Jeff’s hair flailed out like wild grass, and cold gray sweat beads broke out on his forehead.

  “You’re making that up…” Danny looked for himself. “Ha, my man Jeff doesn’t lie.”

  Zoe read a few lines aloud from a more recent post, about Mimi meeting a professor at a park bench in Washington Square on a snowy night, then as they talked and the snow fell upon them, they both turned into fearless peregrine falcons and began to fly.

  “I hate to say it but there’s a glimmer of talent,” said Danny. He poured more whisky for Jeff. “Your loving wife ought to work on that. I know because I fantasized about dropping out of business school and writing magical realism prose a million times.”

  Zoe didn’t point out that Danny could quit his job any time he wanted. Rich people were always self-conscious about being rich. Nor did she speculate aloud on something she was thinking, that maybe Danny had taken such a disliking to Ming because she had a kind of courage he didn’t, letting the world see her literary experiments. “She seemed like a disruptive force,” Danny went on, as if he’d halfway read Zoe’s mind. “From the moment she parted bodies at your party and came tossing her hair at us. I felt like she wanted, I dunno, to take a piece of our souls.”

  Jeff got up and opened his backpack, strewing papers across a table. “You guys have gotta see this. Exhibit A. Invoices from Doctor Perlmutter. She paid most of them. She put eight thousand bucks on my credit card. She owes them five thousand, and they keep sending the bills. But she paid off another twenty-nine thousand. Where did she get the money, you might astutely and legitimately ask? Well here’s a clue. I came home and all her stuff was gone, she left only this bullshit note, and then the doorbell rang and what the fuck, there’s a police detective looking for guess who. She left her cell phone, by the way. The cop pointed that out, it’s a tracker.”

  Zoe sank into her chair and everything seemed to swirl. She heard Jeff say “your China fixer is a wanted criminal,” and a voice in her own head thunder this is the end of your dissertation. She heard Danny say, “I knew she was bad news.”

  Sometime in the middle of the night, she woke up with a name rollicking through her mind. Ming had talked about her parents’ company a lot. She’d said they called it Rising Phoenix because it was their own rebirth. It was awfully hard to disappear in the twenty-first century. She padded into Danny’s study, took out her laptop and Googled the name. She found a Chinese website for a silicon company in Beijing, and a phone number.

  It was 2:00 a.m. in New York, 3:00 the following afternoon in Beijing. She dialed the number. A receptionist answered and connected her to Mr. Cheng.

  “Zoe. We’ve heard so much about you,” Ming’s father’s voice resounded with hospitality rather than surprise. “We hope we’ll meet you. And you know her husband?” He grasped at the word as if Ming’s having a husband made everything all right.

  “How is your health?”

  “Health … oh, I have high blood pressure but I’m taking walks, I’m fine, feeling pretty good consider….” He stopped himself. “Oh. I had a scare….”

  So Ming had lied about her father being sick. Zoe could hear the cover-up in his voice, as if he understood that Ming had come up with a face-saving excuse for leaving her beloved New York. Zoe understood, too, that Jeff was probably right about everything. She inhaled, gave herself the line “How is Ming?”

  Mr. Cheng seemed like a cordial man, eager to improvise his own script. He said Ming was working hard for her brother’s business, making money for them, and there were plenty of opportunities for her husband in China too. Zoe could almost hear bells tinkling in his voice over the word “husband.” Ming had told him about Zoe’s dissertation, he said, and she should come soon too, so that she could see the village before it changed. Dead air, then Mr. Cheng said it was hard to reach Ming because she was always at meetings, “but I’ll tell her you called.”

  “Fuck,” Jeff spat out later that morning. “Now you’ve destroyed my fantasy that she’s been bumped off and I’m rid of her.” Jeff stayed. Zoe found him dozing on Danny’s sofa that evening when she came in from her classes. He moved into the spare bedroom that night, and filled it with crumpled papers and the stink of stale Scotch.

  

  Over a month of Christmas festivities and wintry nights, Zoe waited. Ming didn’t call back. Jeff, who eventually went back to his place in Brooklyn, called every day. “I can’t pay my rent. My wife left me with a humongous debt and I’m too depressed to work.”

  She didn’t tell Jeff, or Danny, that something in the name Sunshine Village felt like a lodestar calling. It made no sense even to her. She didn’t tell them, either, that she’d found some maps in the China collection at the school library and had poured over the route because wasn’t it better to go on her own than lose all the time she’d put into studying the Third Front?

  In the second week of January, Ming left a message on Zoe’s cell phone.

  That night, Zoe crept out of the bedroom while Danny was sleeping, and returned the call.

>   “Hello…Zoe?” Ming said her name as if it were the answer to a prayer. “I’m at lunch now with an American colleague.” Ming sent giggle waves across two hemispheres. “We have an idea for Sunshine Village. Can you come?”

  The way Ming had giggled—it was just like the way she’d giggled when she’d announced she was marrying Jeff, Zoe decided as she lay awake that night. More the vibrations of a lunchtime tryst than a work meeting.

  She told Danny the next morning that she was going to Sunshine Village. “I know, I know,” she acknowledged, “but I can handle Ming.”

  “Suit yourself. I hope you find plenty of cocks that curve like the new moon.”

  “You’re going to lose Danny if you go to China,” Billie warned.

  “We don’t have a game-playing relationship.”

  “That’s a game itself, pretending there’s no game. And how do you plan to pay for your ticket? I was counting on you to marry Danny and pay off my credit cards, you know.”

  How to pay for the trip was a problem, of course. Her only real hope was that Professor Engelhorn would know what to do; maybe he’d be able to dig up a grant. She called him and asked. Large insects fluttered in her head.

  “Of course. We’ll come up with something,” he said on the phone, “when the department opens again in January.”

  But in January, he told her everyone was scrimping. There was one possible grant, but they won’t start even looking at applications until March.

  “I have my orals this semester anyway,” Zoe muttered, feeling tears threaten to pour out.

  “Yeah…but it’s an opportunity you should seize. Can you use the village in your orals?”

  “I can’t afford to go.” The words burned her throat like smoke from a rancid cigarette.

  “Let me see what else I can do.”

  A couple of days later Professor Engelhorn called her into his office again. He said she absolutely must keep this a secret, but he would advance her the money. He wrote out a check for two thousand dollars. “I’m afraid this won’t be five-star travel,” he said with a rueful half-smile.