Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  That didn’t come out right, did it?

  Why? How did you want it to sound?

  More authoritative. More Samantha Jones.

  You’re not quite there yet.

  But I meant it, she says, whether or not it sounded right. It’s a good idea. It’s necessary. I mean, as part of the overall experiment.

  Because orgasm is a prelinguistic state.

  Because you’re my ideal. Putatively. Or as close to it as I’m likely to get in Bangkok. And I’m yours, in a way. Or, well, we’ll see.

  The only way to know is to find out.

  Without looking down, she holds out the joint with one hand, and with the other begins to unbutton her shirt.

  Her breasts are pale, diminutive, and freckled.

  It’s like time travel, isn’t it? I bet I remind you of your first girlfriend.

  My first girlfriend? I want to ask her. Shoshana Rubenstein, in ninth grade, on the Willow spring break camping trip? In a tent, halfway up Sugarloaf Mountain, on the Appalachian Trail? We zipped our sleeping bags together and fooled around in the dark. And the only smoke was the campfire smoke that permeated everything: our clothes, our hair, our lips and tongues. Would you like to know? I want to ask her. Would you like a fake past, too, to complement a fake body? The first black woman I ever knew—and I begin to wonder, in the moment before I take the hit, searing my lungs, where my nausea has gone. Is this the only cure for conceptual fatigue?

  This isn’t really happening, I say. Want to know how I feel? That’s how I feel. It isn’t really happening.

  You mean because it’s already happened?

  Kind of. But that isn’t it, I’m thinking. What’s the word, I ask her, what’s the tense, for an experience that happens neither then, nor now, but out of time? An experience that never should have happened at all? Isn’t there a word for that?

  We’ll have to make one up, she says, smiling. She likes a game. We should try Scrabble. Not subjunctive, but anti-junctive. Contra-junctive.

  Contra-conditional.

  Yeah. Good. Contra-conditional. Now enough, she says, reaching out and grasping me by the temples. Put this face where it belongs.

  6.

  In the winter of my fourth year in graduate school, I came down with a bad case of the flu—or what I thought was the flu. In fact, it was mononucleosis. Only after I’d dragged myself through the last two weeks of classes and spent a night in the hospital, shivering with exhaustion under two blankets, did I realize the doctors were serious and I had to stay in bed. For the second half of January and most of February I slept in unpredictable cycles, like a newborn, and when I wasn’t sleeping I sat in my Ikea reading chair with my feet up, drinking weak jasmine tea, and shifting though stacks of photocopies I’d brought back from the National Library in Taipei. My dissertation prospectus was past due. If I didn’t submit something by the end of March, my graduate director had informed me, my stipend for the next year would be in jeopardy. There were days when I flew through page after page and days when my eyes stopped on the simplest characters, the most obvious compounds, and refused to budge, till I’d fumbled through the gigantic Hanyu Dacidian, heavier than the telephone book, that I kept propped open next to me atop a dead television.

  In that chair I spent nearly as many hours asleep as awake. Wendy had just started full-time at the conservation lab in Houghton Library and was gone from eight to six. For company I left the radio turned to WCET, an open-format station, now defunct, which played BBC and CBC news and documentaries interspersed with jazz, classical, folk, blues, Afro-pop. I liked the sound of the announcers’ voices, always recognizable, always cheerful, unhurried, not aiming to please. They sounded like volunteers, which, in fact, they probably were. And alternating genres of music during the day—which ordinarily would have irritated me to no end—kept me from falling into a complete stupor. But it was the news programs, the voices drifting in from all over the world, that allowed me to sleep. In those weeks I had intensely vivid dreams in which I was never myself. I was a Masai tribeswoman, squatting in the red dust outside my thatched hut, building up a fire from embers. I was a French marine biologist afloat in a raft off Prince Edward Island, scanning the slate water for fresh icebergs. I was a nine-year-old Muslim boy searching for my mother in the wreckage of our house in Ahmedabad. Becalmed, I was like a sponge for world disasters. Routine pronouncements of sympathy from ambassadors brought tears leaking from my eyes.

  It took longer and longer, every day, to step out of the sticky webwork of the dream and orient myself. I could make it all the way to the bathroom without knowing where I was. Or who I was. Every muscle in my body felt smooth and slack; my skin was the non-color of skim milk.

  What happened next is a little hard to explain. I can attribute it to the sickness, of course, to the loneliness of the graduate student in those years when the classwork is over and the degree is still inconceivably distant. I could blame it on Derrida and Barthes, de Man and Bataille, Gadamer, Benjamin, Steiner, Blanchot: all those who convinced me of the impossibility of what I was doing, and the necessity of doing it anyway. Derangement, Bataille once said, is the only key to learning. I became convinced that I should use my disorientation to my advantage. With what little febrile energy I had, I scotch-taped pages of Chinese poetry to the mirror in the bathroom, so that I would read them when I stumbled to the toilet in the middle of the night. I kept a legal pad tucked next to my leg and tried to write, only in Chinese, whatever came into my mind when I opened my eyes.

  There was nothing. I felt crushed into my chair, held down by cinder blocks. Fits of weeping in the shower. I gazed down at my laptop in pieces, four stories below.

  It’s miao, I said to Wendy one night. Miao is doing this to me.

  You’re doing this to you, she said.

  It wasn’t that she avoided me. For five weeks she’d brought all my meals on a tray: bowl after bowl of two-chicken soup, her mother’s recipe, plates of plain spaghetti, roasted duck eggs for strength. Somehow she’d convinced my doctors to make house calls when I couldn’t roll over in bed. But when I’d roused myself enough to sit in the chair, and then descended into the recesses of doubt, she stayed away, except to ask if I was hungry. How could I blame her for that? Would it have helped for her to say, this isn’t the mono, you’re clinically depressed?

  Maybe it would have helped. It might have bought me some stability, some perspective, a middle way. But I doubt it. In any case, the cure was already upon us. I’m pregnant, she said, finally. It’s ten weeks now. And the next morning I was in the shower and back at the library by nine.

  • • •

  The poets Wu Kaiqin and Meng Faru were born three years apart, in 1095 and 1098, in Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song dynasty. Technically they were first cousins. Meng’s real father, Wu Qingfeng, the eldest of four brothers, was an alcoholic and chronic gambler who nearly bankrupted the family before dying of tuberculosis in his thirties; he fathered Meng with his uncle’s youngest concubine just before he died, and to spare the family embarrassment Meng was given to a servant and raised in the compound as her child. Despite this, Kaiqin and Faru were each other’s closest friends and playmates; they looked so much alike that strangers often assumed they were brothers. The Family Record of the Wu Clan, written by one of Meng’s great-grandchildren, states that they began composing poems together as soon as they had learned to write a few characters, scratching them on the flagstones of the family’s Orchid-Viewing Pavilion with pebbles taken from the goldfish pond. Later, when they were teenagers, they composed so many poems that the pages lay strewn across the garden like autumn leaves, stained with wine and candle wax. Wu was a brilliant military student who impressed the head of the Imperial Guard with a commentary on The Art of War when he was only seventeen; he passed the government’s highest exam, the jinshi, at twenty-one, and Meng, a more capricious but equally brilliant scholar, followed him only two years later. They seemed destined to be forever linked, poet-sc
holars at the highest levels of the Imperial administration.

  Only five years later, when Wu had just married his first wife, disaster struck. A confidential memorandum he had written criticizing the power of the eunuch Jin Kang over the Treasury was discovered lying on the ground outside the palace gates, apparently dropped by a clumsy courier. Circulated throughout the capital, it made him an instant enemy of Jin and his many powerful allies. Six months later, Wu was banished to a remote outpost, Zhongdian, on the western frontier of Yunnan Province, nearly four thousand miles from Kaifeng. He never returned to the capital.

  I first read the Family Record of the Wu Clan in Wudeng, in an anthology of minor Song historical documents in the Weiming College library. The Record contains nearly a hundred poems by Meng—appropriately, as it was written by Meng’s descendant—but only a handful of Wu Kaiqin’s. Most of them, the Record states, were lost in the second Jurchen invasion, after Wu’s death, when the town of Zhongdian was burned and then razed to the ground. In the first Jurchen invasion Wu had been taken captive, with his family, and held hostage in the Taklamakan Desert for fifteen years, while the Jurchen negotiated a sweeping land treaty with the Emperor. Because diplomatic correspondence passed back and forth regularly, Wu was able to send and receive letters, and the only poems of his that survive were enclosed in letters he sent to Meng Faru. The letters themselves were thought lost until the 1960s, when they were rediscovered in a miscellaneous appendix to a forgotten anthology in the National Library in Taipei. My dissertation, a translation with commentary, was titled The Captivity Letters of Wu Kaiqin.

  • • •

  By the early decades of the twelfth century, when Wu Kaiqin wrote his letters, I wrote in my introduction, China had been the conscious center of its own universe for nearly two thousand years. Educated people knew, in theory, that beyond the Tibetan plateau and on the far side of the tribute kingdoms of Central Asia and Vietnam there existed other civilizations, most notably India, where the Buddha was born. A few government officials, geographers and mapmakers, who had contact with merchants from the Middle East, knew that the caliph of Baghdad ruled over a vast kingdom that included red- and blond-haired men with large noses and white skin. But outside of Kaifeng and the other large cities, then as today, most Chinese people had never seen anyone of another ethnicity. Even citizens of the major tribute states, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, resembled Chinese people very closely. To be human was to look Chinese.

  Wu Kaiqin and his family had the almost-unheard-of experience, among Chinese people of their era, of living surrounded entirely by foreigners for fifteen years. At the time of their capture the family numbered eleven—Wu, his three wives, and their seven children, ranging from infancy to thirteen years old. The youngest child (name unknown) died of a diarrheal illness in Turfan soon after they arrived there. The other ten all survived the experience, but all of them, apart from Wu Kaiqin, his first wife, Tian Mei, and their eldest son, Wu Fengguang, chose to stay in Turfan rather than be returned to China when the period of captivity ended and Prince Jilan allowed them to go. In his letters to Meng Faru, Wu Kaiqin never explains the circumstances that ruptured his family, or even alludes to the two wives and six children he left behind in the desert. But the Family Record of the Wu Clan cites other sources that claim that Wu’s younger wives deserted him for Jurchen husbands, and that his two younger sons both married Jurchen wives. It also says that when given free passage by the Prince, Wu “allowed everyone in his family to choose freely whether to stay in Turfan or return to the land of the black-haired people, the land of the One Hundred Names.”

  What allowed Wu this extraordinary equanimity, this attitude that we would think of as extremely broad-minded even in our own time? One obvious interpretation would be that Wu was simply responding to the wishes of the younger members of his family, who had grown up in captivity with no memory of their home in China. Another interpretation would be that even if Wu was ostensibly free to leave, he was forced to leave members of his family behind as a diplomatic gesture. There is no evidence to sustain or disprove these theories. The only surviving evidence that comes directly from Wu’s own hand is his letters, which point to a remarkable transformation of his attitude toward the Jurchen. As Tan Zhiqiang put it in his entry on Wu in the New Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Literature, “This was a change almost unheard of—as his experience was almost unheard of—in the whole three thousand year span of classical Chinese poetry.” In his letters and particularly his poems, Wu evolved what we might call the only indigenous Chinese concept of racial equality or unity, through the interceding of a mysterious concept or substance called miao.

  Miao is a hapax legomenon—a word which, as the Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics puts it, “occurs only once in a written corpus, either narrowly or broadly defined.” In this case the “corpus” is the entire known body of traditional (pre-1911) Chinese literature. Barring the discovery of antecedent texts that have not yet seen the light of day, it appears that Wu himself coined miao, combining the characters (that is, “people,” “fire,” “water,” and the term ren, which means equality, justice, or humane action). The idea that a scholar would invent a new word is considered something of a scandal in Chinese philology, and during the Ming and Qing Dynasties there were lengthy debates among imperial orthographers over whether miao should be included in dictionaries of variant or rare characters, and whether a character invented and used by one person (if indeed that was the case) could be said to constitute a word at all.

  The hypothesis that Wu himself coined the term miao is borne out by the letters and poems themselves, which hint at a discovery or revelation that Wu is reluctant to put into words. Consider the following poem, dated April–May 1121:

  What is it that separates friends and strangers?

  What is it that separates foreign and intimate?

  Strange, indeed, are its transmutations,

  This miao that swallows up five colors.

  Some speak of ancestral emptiness,

  A nothing that is yet an infinity.

  But when miao is mentioned,

  No one can say anything at all.

  In a passage in a letter to Meng Faru sent nearly five years later, Wu offers his most explicit summation of miao:

  Have you ever heard a young student playing the lute strike a wrong note that causes your ears to shrink back in displeasure? Listen closely to the sound [zhi yin] of the wrong note and you will hear the harmonic principle [li] of the universe. Miao is the wrong note that harmonizes all human appearances and allows us to forget “near” and “far,” “dark” and “light,” “Chinese” and “barbarian.”

  The late Ming commentator Zhu Bing dismissed Wu’s miao poems as “pseudo-mysticism” and “quackery disguised as immortality”; those phrases were used to marginalize Wu for nearly three centuries. And of course it is easy to understand why the concept of miao would seem unacceptable in late imperial China, where, to quote Edmund Chang, “Chinese identity was constituted more and more as a fortress mentality, a preservation of a static order, and a resistance to outside influence other than the strict hierarchy of tribute.” This attitude about the continuity and essential unity of the Chinese tradition has defined Western scholarship and popular impressions of China up to the present. Indeed, many contemporary commentators on China treat Chinese nationalism as a monolithic, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and at least tacitly racist assumption that China is, as Pamela Taylor put it on Fox News recently, “ethnically superior . . . a natural center for world domination.”

  While miao does not constitute anything like a dissident tradition in Chinese culture—since the term begins and ends in the work of one poet who lived and worked mostly outside the borders of the empire—it does represent the imaginative capacity of the Chinese tradition as it existed in a more cosmopolitan, more unstable world. A situation not unlike the world China finds itself in today.

  • • •

  Two years later, when my
dissertation was all but finished, Pearl Chen, my senior adviser, took me to lunch at the Faculty Club. She was an imposing woman who’d always reminded me a little of Julia Child, with a broad, doughy face and a booming voice. Her grandfather was Chinese ambassador to Washington under the Kuomintang; her father married into the Boston Bradfords and worked at the Federal Reserve; she’d started her own career in the Fifties as a CIA operative at New Asia College in Hong Kong. Talking to her was like touring a vast, eccentrically arranged museum, half full of Tang funerary ceramics, half full of old copies of Foreign Affairs.

  Now, she said finally, after the dessert dishes were cleared, Kelly, we have to talk about the predicament you’re in.

  I stared at her and put down my fork.

  What predicament is that?

  I think you’re in the wrong business. She drummed her fingers on the tablecloth. The problem isn’t the work, she said. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s you. You’re a little too insistent, dear. A little too vehement. You can’t expect China to be something it’s not. You can’t expect the world to be something it’s not.

  I stammered something in protest. Whatever it was, I’ve now forgotten it. And it doesn’t matter.

  I’m not telling you what to write, she said. Or what to have written, at this point. I just don’t think anyone will hire you. You’re expected to show a little more fealty. If you were Chinese, you might stake this kind of claim. I hate to put it so crudely, but there it is. There’s only so much one can prove in chasing down eccentrics. It’s like digging up some obscure neo-Platonist and trying to prove that Pauline Christianity really is a misreading of the pre-Socratics. Or that Jesus was actually a Buddhist. You know these people who do this kind of thing. Of course, you can find popular success that way. But I don’t recommend it. There’s no stability in success. Just ask Joan Crawford. Or the Khmer Rouge.