So the next-best thing is to reach out to Beijing’s international journalists, a loose and backstabbing confederacy, I realize, but I have to start somewhere. Ditching Yuh-vonne and her Happy-Go-Luck services and letting Mary take Larry to his makeup dialysis, I spend a day making discreet inquiries among the fraternity of Western journalists covering China. No dice. I spend another day discreetly calling Chinese reporters on the mastheads of native English-language newspapers. Additional no dice. As the days wind down, I find my inquiries becoming less and less discreet. The thin and subtle feelers I put out are turning into large and hairy vines. Eventually the vines turn into a shaggy net that I cast wider and wider. I know I’m supposed to be hush-hush, but on the other hand, as the Red Guards used to be fond of saying while bashing people’s heads, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. The net’s soon wide as can be, encompassing pretty much everyone I encounter. Private butlers, public bartenders, night watchmen, strip-club bouncers—all are left scratching their heads in my wake. “Kidney? What mean ‘lightly used kidney’?”
Elevators are a particularly promising venue. Here’s how it goes in one of them.
“From Seoul?” I ask a Korean businessman whose robust voice makes him seem wealthy.
“SEOUL, YES!” he shouts. “YES, SEOUL! HA HA HA!”
I never knew I could be so funny by merely stringing two words together. But when I string together a few more, he begins guffawing so volcanically that I fear for the cable lofting us skyward, especially as he starts bouncing around the elevator, feinting jabs at my midsection.
“NO PRELOVED KIDNEY! HA HA HA HA HA! NO PRELOVED KIDNEY!”
Here’s how it goes in another elevator, with a Caucasian man helping a tiny Chinese baby girl hop across the floor. Something about the way he handles her, as though she were expensive porcelain, tells me he’s a new parent.
“Cute baby. You adopting?”
“Yes, just today.”
“Congratulations. Where are you from?”
“Spanish.”
We watch the little sweetheart for a while. There’s a bald spot at the back of her head where her hair has rubbed off in her crib; she probably wasn’t moved as often as she should have been in the orphanage. “New life for her, eh?”
“Yes.” He pats his heart. “And for us.”
I take a breath and consider asking whether the adoption agency would happen to have an extra kidney in the system, before coming to my senses.
“Hey, have a great day,” I say. “Good luck with your little charmer.”
Obviously I’m getting too close to the line. It even almost-crosses my mind to pass out flyers in Tiananmen Square—figuring I’m giving up on China in a few days anyhow. What’re they going to do, detain me for being desperate?
Uh, yes….
That’s when I decide I need a breather. It’s been three days since the fiasco at the dialysis clinic, and I treat myself to a swim around the perimeter of the hotel’s giant kidney-shaped pool—it feels like I’m tracing Larry’s organ, writ large—and afterward make for my favorite breakfast buffet on the sixteenth floor. I lift the lids of the silver chafing dishes to ogle the food items, which seem a cross between fifties-style Betty Crocker–type hors d’oeuvres and something from an agricultural country-fair display: demure heart-shaped marshmallows topped with overchewy corn niblets, pizza-type waffle wedges topped with dino-size sausages.
While I’m filling my plate, I’m approached by a waitress I haven’t seen before. The nameplate on her olive drab uniform says TRAINEE, but she tells me her real name is Jinghua.
“Jinghua,” I say, mauling the pronunciation.
“It mean ‘situation splendid.’”
“Jinghua,” I try again, but can’t get my mouth to do that nasal thing. That mouth thing.
“Give it up,” she says, smirking demurely. “Be content at call me Jenny or Jade.”
“Jade is nice,” I say.
“So you little fairy?”
“Excuse me?”
“You try a little fairy rice?”
“Fairy rice?”
“Sorry for my simple mistake. Fry rice. Or try neuter?”
“Noodles?”
“Yes, sorry once more. Noo-dle.”
After I settle into my bamboo-and-cane throne, Jade is still with me. She stands in attendance while I sip my surprisingly great orange juice. Then she trips over her own feet just standing there but betrays no embarrassment, no lack of composure. She’s like a pony, not quite used to her long legs. I’m charmed.
“What under you hat?” she asks.
“Nothing but hair loss. See?” I show her. She studies for a moment.
“Torrible,” she says. “How old you are!”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“No, that is my question. How old?”
“Oh, me? I’m eighty-four.”
She thinks this is wildly funny. I’m becoming legendary throughout the Middle Kingdom for my rarefied sense of humor. “If you could be any age, what would it be?” she asks conversationally.
“I like being eighty-four! It’s a great age. What about you?”
“For me, I like you be twenty-five, so be my big brother.”
I meant how old would she be, but that’s okay. I’m pleased with her answer.
“But since you so old, we must content to be father-daughter.”
Works for me. She can be the daughter I never had, poised and pretty. It’s been twenty-five years since I was last in Beijing, as a foot-loose young man between wives. And how old is Jade? Twenty-four. If any of the women I’d hooked up with last time I was here had gotten pregnant, the child would be Jade’s age now. She’s a grad student of foreign relations, she tells me, only a part-time waitress, and I immediately feel more at ease with her than I ever did with Yuh-vonne—her frank, guileless face, her teeth that are as white in back as in front. But how can she, like Yuh-vonne, be so free and easy about her American name? Jenny or Jade—how can she allow her identity to be so malleable? A Chinese mystery, one of those enigmas that long ago earned the natives that awful adjective “inscrutable.”
But she’s giggling at me again, producing cute bubbles in her teeth. “You are much ability to make me laugh,” she says.
“What’d I say now?”
“Not say—do. You stir coffee with arm of sunglass.”
“That’s an American thing. All the very important people, the presidents and such, we stir our coffee with our sunglasses. It’s like a code, how we recognize each other abroad.”
“You are pulling it again, my legs!”
So I am. But in a chaste, fatherly fashion. She’s so trusting I wouldn’t have it any other way. Her dark eyes are candidly veiled, like seal eyes, peering at me with more openness than I’m used to. Maybe that’s what gives her such an air of vulnerability. For me, after being with Yuh-vonne, it’s like going from a hot dog to a cream puff, except that Jade is strong as well. She knows who she is. I reach for the clod of preternaturally bright scrambled egg, with a cowlick of parsley on top. And continue making conversation, since she shows no signs of leaving. Her supervisor sees her idling with me but backs away, bowing.
“So, Twenty-four, do you have a big brother or sister in real life?”
“No, Eighty-four. I am only one child.”
“Is it lonely for you, to be an only child?”
“Oh, no, I am glad of this. I am number one! I tell my mather, if you have another baby, I will kill it.”
“You were joking, surely?”
“No—serious!” She giggles, pleased with herself: “He he he he.” I never heard a giggle so literal before, but it works. I would say it sounds scripted, except it’s so charming.
“So you are their treasure.”
“Treasure, yes. My mather tease me, say she like her dog better than me, but I know is not true. In true, I am responsibility to be best daughter I can, safe and good. If there is tragedy and I am killed, like in earthquic
k, then they have no one, is torrible!” Her eyes fill with tears. “Such a thing take place sometime and is very torment.”
Every now and then, you meet someone like this—someone you feel should never have to die. How could such adorableness ever die? How could such sparkling innocence be snuffed? I want to protect her from death. I want to take her under my wing and make sure no harm comes to her—no earthquick, no depressionism, none of the things that hurt our children. Of course I can’t say any of these things, so I content myself with saying, “Your parents must love you very much.”
“I hope that,” she says ardently. “So what is your plan in this day?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“This day is my lucky day, I think,” she offers. “Because this day I show you my country to repair my English.”
This isn’t delivered flirtatiously—just earnestly. Situation splendid.
“You want to show me around? What’ll it cost me?”
She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to think ill of me….
“How much to be my guide for a few hours?” I say, tapping my watch and wallet, but this puts a shadow of shock on her face.
“Nothing!” she says. “I want repair my English—”
“Okay, yes, sorry, I’d like that. Maybe tomorrow morning?”
“We take tour. I show you fuck market?”
“Pardon…?”
“Antique and such, also modern product for deep discount?”
“Oh, sure. Folk market sounds good.”
“Where we have supper?”
“Supper? I can’t take so much of your time.”
“I am nothing to do tomorrow except working, sleeping, shopping.”
She looks so dejected that I feel like the Spanish father in the elevator, handling his baby with kid gloves.
“We’ll play supper by ear,” I say. “Where’s good to meet tomorrow morning?”
“Outside hotel. Not in lobby. I not tell hotel I doing this.”
“Undercover, eh?”
“Double-oh-seven, bang bang!” she snickers, blowing smoke off her fingertips.
“Gotcha, outside the hotel.”
I will not—I will not!—pass out flyers in Tiananmen. To distract myself I return to my luxury suite, settle myself among my 100-percent Egyptian cotton linens, and knuckle down to cast my shaggy net wider still. I wish I could use the distinguished mahogany fountain pen provided by the hotel to write letters in longhand to everyone I ever knew in the hemisphere, but I settle for e-mail. Some remedial apologies are top of the list.
Dear Safrina, First of all I want to apologize for the way I left you waiting at the Singapore airport last time. I know it’s nine teen years ago, but I’m trying to make amends for my youth. What can I say? I loved you, but you had too many boyfriends for me to handle. I had to break your heart before you broke mine. Anyway, I find myself in your neck of the woods again and wonder if you might have access to any working kidneys on any of the islands….
Dear Achara, I’m sure it comes as something of a shock to hear from me again, two decades after our painful falling-out, but I’m writing to ask an unlikely favor. I remember you telling me that your aunt was the queen of Thailand. With the vast con nections that must be available to your family, do you know anywhere in Bangkok I could possibly get my hands on…
Corazón! It’s way past time that we bury the hatchet. Why point fingers? There was enough blame to go around. I’m not mad anymore and hope you’re not either, because I have a dire favor to ask. Manila has become quite the sophisticated medical center this last decade and…
Then, speaking of the devil, just after I’ve pinged this off, Manila pings me back. Not Corazón or any of my other old Asian flames, but a beachside motel where I earlier made tentative arrangements if our week in Beijing didn’t pan out.
To whom Sir and Madam
We look forward where you stay. At your request we have book two ooms. However we are in perplex about you request for rooms on separate floors for ‘breathing room’ purpose. Is pity Sir you request or two floors can not be honored because we are single floor operation. However we can place each room far from the brother room, if suitable, on other side of Relaxation Yard which is covered by green plants to make guests feel cleansing and comfortable….
Score! I snag this despite its vaguely prisonlike sound. It’s only a contingency anyway. Hopefully, we won’t need Manila if China somehow comes through.
One more outgoing e-mail before I get to my in-box: A warm thank-you to Happy-Go-Luck Travel, telling them I won’t be needing Yuh-vonne’s services any longer and directing them to give her a large tip in farewell. It’s in honor of the little teeth prints on her lips, may she be happy every day. But, oh dear: Is Larry’s generosity rubbing off on me?
No, it’s his pragmatism. I’m purchasing Yuh-vonne’s continued silence. The last thing we need is for her to blow the whistle on us.
Nibbling the plunder I pocketed from breakfast, a croissant I’m happy to confirm does not have a 4-H blue ribbon clipped to it, I move on to my incoming. The first is from the Disapproving Docs:
“Dan, we must once again state in the strongest possible terms that we find your actions reckless in the extreme. The very idea of scavenging for a life-saving surgery would almost be laughable if it weren’t so naïve. There are simply so many unknowns here that we demand you clear all contacts with us before proceeding. You have lined up rock solid contacts, we assume?”
Oh, rock solid, never fear. Into the recycle bin it goes. I open another e-mail from my one and only contact, the embassy friend of the friend I e-mailed before I left home. Izzy is gone all week, it turns out, but wants to know if we can meet on Friday evening when he gets back. I check my calendar. That would be cutting it close, because it’s only two days before our backup flight to Manila. Izzy suggests we meet at his synagogue, some sort of makeshift temple for expat Western Jews apparently, in a space graciously donated by a foreign-language institute. It sounds sufficiently Somerset Maugham–ish to spark my interest, and I tell him yes.
And now the reward for all my hard work: an e-mail from home. Even tapping the name of my youngest stings my heart with yearning.
Dad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MS. BOULDRY MYNEW TEACHER IS
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
These are some words to describe her:
funny, creative, smart, childish, helpful, caring, weird,
CHATTER-BOX!!!!!!!!!!! and gets disracted really easy!
dad i love you sincerely,
Jeremy Roth-Rose
P.S. I think Flight attendants wear to much lipstick, Dont you?
Okay, that’s it. I need a blast of family heat. It’s 9:00 A.M. here, 9:00 P.M. there on a school night, but they might still be up. I dial.
The incomparable wife: “How’s it going, hon?”
Her unworthy husband: “Compared to being on a chairlift with two preadolescents? It’s a cinch,” I say.
“You staying safe? Boys, try to keep it down when I’m talking to Dad in China—”
“DAD IN CHINA!?” There’s the sound of the phone being grabbed, fumbled, moved to the fifty-yard line, intercepted. Touchdown! I manage to ram in the earplugs I’ve arranged at the ready just in time.
“How’s it goin’, Pop? You’re not getting arrested or anything?”
“Going okay, Spence.”
“Not getting gunned down by Laurence?” he says with a mock French accent. Our little motif, for some reason.
“Laurence keeps missing me so far. What’s going on with you?”
“Won a tennis trophy. Wrote a cool poem. I’m well rounded.”
“Amazing,” I say. “You astound and delight me, big boy.”
“Yeah, so I’m feeding the ducks like you asked, and everything’s fine, except Mom keeps fast-forwarding the movies
through the sex parts just because Jeremy’s too young.”
“AND I ALREADY KNOW WHAT SEX IS!” adds his exuberant little brother in the background. A statement Spencer cannot let pass unchallenged.
“Okay, Jeremy, what is it?”
“Guys, guys, have a sense of the moment,” I say, “this is a phone call from around the globe.”
“Well, Mom’s saying it’s Jeremy’s turn. See ya, Dad.”
“DAD, HI, I CAME UP WITH SOME INVENTIONS JUST LIKE YOUR COUSIN. READY? BEER POPSICLES!”
“Not bad, Jeremy, I could see that catching—”
“OH, AND HOW ABOUT THIS ONE: CHEESE DOUGHNUTS! SO NEXT TIME, DAD, COULD YOU TAKE ME TO CHINA WITH YOU, BECAUSE I HAVE LOTS OF IDEAS, AND MAYBE I COULD HELP SAVE YOUR COUSIN, TOO!”
“That’s a really nice offer, Jeremy, but I don’t think—”
“BUT, DAD, YOUR COUSIN’S NOT REALLY GOING TO DIE, IS HE, DAD? YOU WON’T LET THAT HAPPEN, WILL YOU, DAD?”
“Well, I’m doing my best to—”
“OH, AND, DAD, GUESS WHAT’S THE BEST SOUND IN THE WORLD? THE SOUND OF TEETH CRUNCHING INTO A BAGEL! EVER HEAR THAT, DAD? IT’S SO DELICIOUS-SOUNDING! READY, HERE IT IS….”
And then, from halfway around the world, I hear it, clear as a bell, the delicate sound of my son’s front teeth breaking the crust of a toasted bagel. And he’s right, it is delicious-sounding. It’s blessed-sounding. But his quiet, sensual side doesn’t fool me for a minute.
“Good night, hon. And, Jeremy, guess what? I figured out what you’re gonna be when you grow up.”
“WHAT?”
“A wealthy Korean businessman.”
CHAPTER 6
“Chutzpah” Is a Jewish Word
Man’s schemes are inferior to those made by heaven.
Pine. The minty smell of pine needles…
Next afternoon I go back to the discount hotel and find Larry on a chaise in the courtyard, catching some rays. The pleasant scent of piney goodness perfumes the air. In the milky light, Larry’s skin looks like drapery that’s been stored in the back of a closet for years. He’s wearing what looks like a Depression-era bathing suit and his box turtle sunglasses while Mary is giving him a foot rub. I can only imagine the coaxing it’s taken from her to get him to take off his Businessman’s Running Shoes, but now she’s knuckling the tender veal of his insteps while Larry half snores with contentment despite the Peking Opera playing on the portable TV in front of them.
Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life Page 7