Dr. Bethune's Children

by Xue Yiwei

  After washing and dressing, I put Yangyang’s notebook, two biographies of you, one in English and one in French, and a stack of blank paper in my backpack. As I was heading out, I discovered a note by the door—a note Claude had stuck through the mail slot. He said he had called me a few times without getting any answer. And he urged me to turn on the television to watch breaking news about China. It was strange that I had not heard the phone ring. I didn’t think I had slept so soundly.

  I turned on the television. A few channels were reporting on a serious snowstorm in the south of China. An explanation underneath a picture said, “A snowstorm has paralyzed China.” The news would have been all the more surprising had it been geographically a little more precise, because it seldom snows in southern China, which is where I come from.

  According to the news, however, some areas of southern China had been struck by the worst snowstorm in half a century. And it turned out that the epicentre was near my hometown, which had been cut off from the outside world for more than a week, without water or power. The video shown on the television had been shot about a hundred kilometres away. It was shocking. What would it be like at Ground Zero?

  I turned the TV off. It didn’t surprise me that my mother had not mentioned the snow in her telephone call. She wouldn’t have paid attention to the snowstorm, no matter how disastrous it was. Nothing compared with the death of Yangyang’s mother. After years of living in Montreal, I knew the meaning of snowstorm. The situation in my hometown must be even worse than it would be in a Montreal blizzard, because people in China had so little experience dealing with that kind of weather. I felt sad on behalf of the residents of my hometown, especially the martyr’s bride. I don’t know why I thought of her. Was she still alive? How was she managing?

  I left my apartment with a lot on my mind. In the entrance, I saw Bob looking around, and he shook my hand as though he’d been waiting for me. “I’ve never heard about China suffering this kind of disaster,” he said. He listed the things he had just read in a newspaper feature. Cars had been stuck on the highway for over a week. People had frozen or starved to death. Hundreds of travellers were trapped in the train station in Guangzhou, while tens of thousands were stuck in airports in different parts of the country. Most of them wanted to go home to celebrate Spring Festival. Who knows when and if they would get the chance? “The trouble has come before the Olympics even starts,” Bob said. “Do you remember what I said?”

  I knew that he was sad about the disaster, but he was also proud of being right about the problems the Olympics would cause.

  “Mother nature has started to take revenge,” Bob said. Then he listed all the disasters that China had suffered in the past year. His moving concern for China was not surprising, given his exposure as a boy to the majestic march Qilai. The rise of China had been his dream ever since. And his awareness of environmental calamities ensured he wasn’t surprised by the snowstorm. To him, this was just one of a series of disasters. “The year of 2008 is not going to be an easy year for China,” he concluded. I said goodbye before he had the chance to repeat his classic question about the Olympics.

  On the way to the café, my mind was a mess. Innumerable images and imaginings flooded in and mingled together. I thought again of the martyr’s bride. I thought of Yangyang’s mother. And of course I imagined scenes from the disaster. I imagined I was stuck on the highway, at the railway station, at the airport. All of a sudden, I felt homesick. I wished I could be one of those travellers waiting to get home. I wanted to be one of the victims of the storm.

  I ordered a mocha and sat down, facing Place du 6-décembre-1989. I felt discouraged at being plagued by the expatriate complaints of homesickness and nostalgia. Dear Dr. Bethune, I know from the last letters you wrote in China how deeply you were tortured by these two devils. I didn’t want to treat you as a role model in this respect.

  I got out Yangyang’s notebook and flipped through it at random to find out more about his mother. Dear Dr. Bethune, you should know more about her. And I soon found another good story.

  One day, Yangyang asked her why the Arabian woman had had to tell a thousand-and-one stories and not a thousand? To him, one thousand was a perfect number. But his mother insisted that a thousand and one was more perfect, a lot more. She had two reasons. First, superficially, a thousand and one has a symmetrical beauty. But the second and underlying reason is more mysterious. She told Yangyang that he would soon learn the binary system, which, she predicted, would play a key role in the near future. She explained that in base-two, a thousand and one is the same as nine in base-ten, the decimal system. And nine in Chinese is jiu, which sounds the same as the word meaning forever. As such, a thousand and one is in fact a symbol of eternity.

  Was this bizarre explanation a symptom of what my mother had always called her madness?

  Yangyang did not learn binary notation as his mother predicted he would—he died before he had the chance—so he never knew how prescient his mother was. Base-two is the logical basis of the modern computer, and it does indeed play a key role in our digital age. But he must have known that the thousand-and-one nights had nothing to do with either Chinese or the binary system. The interpretation his mother gave was sheer nonsense. In his notebook, however, he didn’t take this interpretation as a symptom. On the contrary, he praised his mother for her particular insight. It gave him a newfound respect for her.

  Discovering our phenomenal relationship with you may have been an expression of her special insight, even if my mother saw it a sign of madness. I was unhappy about her statement, but I had to acknowledge that it wasn’t unreasonable. Maybe Yangyang’s mother was insane before her son left the world. Maybe she always had been. Or maybe she was a prophet.

  I was sad about the way her story had ended. Dear Dr. Bethune, you should know more about this woman. By discovering our identity, she identified the biggest family on Earth, the biggest in history. Yangyang’s esteem for his mother was well-deserved. Besides having exceptional intelligence, she had a keen sense of history. Like a magic wand, this sense of history has left us eternal children. From womb to tomb. From birth to death. Oh, “another boy has died!” Do you still remember that from the historic afternoon when we learned of Chairman Mao’s death?

  My thoughts were getting crazier and crazier, and were only interrupted by another auditory hallucination— the alarming telephone ring. It was time to go home, I realized, to find out the latest news about Yangyang’s mother. I gulped down what was left of my coffee, grabbed my bag, and ran back through the snow to my apartment.

  I waited by the phone for an hour, during which time it rang twice. The first time was a recording telling me I had won a big prize. I hung up before the recording ended. The second time it was a stranger, a woman who asked me in an affected voice whether I was interested in Bell’s new exclusive offer for internet, telephone, and television.

  Assuming that I had missed my mother’s call and worrying it would soon be too late or too early in China, I decided to call first.

  My mother was not the least bit surprised to hear from me. She didn’t complain about the time. Without any delay, she started talking about the most important thing. “Still in Emergency. In a coma.”

  I heard a subtle change in her tone of voice. “Did you go to the hospital to see her?” I asked.

  “Your father went this evening,” she said.

  So she had arranged for him to go. I was gladdened. This was probably the first time she had ever made a concession on a “matter of principle.”

  But her conclusion made my eyes moist. “I don’t think she will wake up again,” she said.

  The phone rang again when I put down the receiver. This time it was Claude. He was watching the American democratic primaries on television. He invited me to bet $20 on the sex and skin colour of the next president of the fascist country to the south, which was his way of referring to the Unit
ed States. “Will it be the white woman or the black man?” he asked.

  “As if it could not be a white man?” I asked him.

  Claude said he hated the Republicans. It was the Republicans who were to blame for turning America into a fascist country.

  Saying that $20 was too much, I did not accept. I thought of the stolen wine glass in the Nixon joke and told him that the next time we went to a restaurant, I would tell him a story that would warn him against betting on an American president.

  I overestimated Claude’s patience. He immediately lowered his bet. “How about $10?” he asked.

  I was feeling listless. I told Claude it didn’t matter to me who the American president was.

  Putting down the phone, I rested on the couch for a while, and then made a simple dinner. After dinner, I trudged around the building a couple of times, my habit for many years. The snow around the building made me think of the storm in China. I turned on the television, hoping to happen upon the latest report, but was disappointed. All of the channels were breaking news about the Democratic primaries.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, it was 10 p.m. when I sat down at the “typewriter” and noticed something was missing. I always put Yangyang’s notebook in front of me when I write you a letter. But where was it now?

  I fumbled through all the places I could have left it before remembering the café opposite Place du 6-décembre- 1989. Yes, I had taken it out of my backpack, flipped through it, and then put it on the table to read the headlines. Then what happened? I heard the telephone ring like an alarm, I gulped down the rest of the coffee, grabbed my backpack, and ran home. Ten hours had elapsed before I noticed I had left Yangyang’s notebook behind.

  I went out at once and ran back to the café. The two women on duty were a bit irritated when I interrupted their conversation. “Are you sure you left it here?” one of them asked indifferently. The other one pointed me towards the lost-and-found box by the washroom. Then they resumed the conversation. They were talking about a young man who had just died of liver cancer.

  There were a lot of misplaced things left by customers in the box, but Yangyang’s notebook was not among them. I checked carefully a second time before giving up. When I returned to the cashier, I overheard the two women continuing their conversation.

  “What were the last few days like?”

  “He was in too much pain.”

  “He used to be such a strong person.”

  “But he fell apart in the end.”

  “It could happen to anyone.”

  I walked out of the café and crossed the road. The bench that I often sat on at Place du 6-décembre-1989 was covered in snow. I stood beside it for a while and breathed in the cold air. Then I held up a fistful of snow and rubbed it on my face. The shock of cold gave me a sudden release and a deep comfort, so timely, so beautiful, for which I was grateful. Looking up at the sky, pellucid and serene, I knew what had just happened.

  Yangyang’s mother had finally breathed her last.

  I was the first to know this, I am sure. As soon as her own body knew it. My deep gratitude reported this news in real time. Then a weird thought occurred to me, which absolved me of guilt for the loss of Yangyang’s notebook. Yes, his mother had taken it. In reuniting with her son and reading his notebook, she would enjoy his praise for her. What a great consolation would that be!

  When I returned to our tower, I discovered Bob sitting in the lobby. “The news makes me so sad,” he said. Of course he meant the snowstorm in the south of China, not the news about Yangyang’s mother.

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, not knowing exactly what I meant by this.

  My curt response left Bob surprised and unhappy. For the first time, he didn’t get into the elevator with me, nor did he ask his classic question about the Olympics.

  Just out of the elevator I heard the telephone ring in my apartment. I got out my key, opened the door, and rushed to the phone.

  But just as I was about to pick it up, I suddenly changed my mind. I did not pick it up. I did not need to pick it up. I knew who was calling and what it was about. And I did not want to talk about this. No, I did not want to hear anything about Yangyang’s mother. No more.

  The phone rang three times that night, as I tossed and turned in my bed. I did not answer it. I don’t know when I got to sleep, but when I did, I had a very strange dream, a dream in which another “terrible beauty” was born.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, the poems you wrote did not convince me that you were a poet. But you must have known where this terrible beauty came from.

  It was a great square, in the centre of which stood a massive statue of you. After a bloody night, the sun was rising again, on a morning so deadly silent it felt like a vacuum. I saw bodies lying on the edge of the square. Two children in that crowd returned to life. They were Yangyang and Yinyin, no doubt about it. They stood up and started to look among the corpses. They were looking for me, in vain. Then they saw the statue in the centre of the square. Thrilled, they ran hand in hand toward you.

  Surrounded by a paralyzing darkness, I shouted their names, wanting to chase after them, but I couldn’t catch up with them. We were separated by the diameter of the earth and by a time difference of twelve hours, the difference between day and night.

  I saw them stop in front of the statue. I stopped, too. I saw that their eyes were full of reverence as they looked at you. And as I looked, my eyes were full of reverence, too.

  Joyfully, their sweet childish voices broke the silence of the morning:

  Comrade Bethune’s spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people . . .

  …A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.

  I, too, mouthed the words to the sentences we had all recited so many times. But the cold that surrounded me made my lips tremble. My voice trembled, too, dear Dr. Bethune. My entire body was trembling in the cold and the darkness of Montreal, your last home, my last home.

  On Chinese New Year’s Eve, I got a call from my publisher in Beijing. In addition to polite well wishes, of course, he asked about my progress on the Dr. Bethune biography. I told him that I had not made any progress at all since the middle of November. Shocked, he asked me why. I hesitated but decided to come clean, telling him what I had written over the past two months. Dr. Bethune’s actual predicament in China, I explained, had called up my impulse to write in this way. In the final stage in his life, I learned from my research, Dr. Bethune did not know what was happening around the world. He waited in despair for letters from comrades and friends that would never come. His vain expectation and endless solitude saddened me. “Another biography of Dr. Bethune would not give his suffering spirit any consolation,” I said. “Such a spirit needs a new treatment, something special, something radical. For instance, the news that he is a father to countless millions, and what has befallen his children.”

  The long pause showed that my publisher must have found my distress strange. Then he casually asked me a few questions about what I had written “to and for” Dr. Bethune. In the end, he returned to the original topic and asked when I would resume the biography, reminding me that the publisher was planning to make it one of the major events of the following year, the seventieth anniversary of Dr. Bethune’s death.

  “The past couple of months of writing has changed, or rather restored, my relationship to Dr. Bethune,” I said firmly. “I don’t think I’ll be able to write his biography.”

  My admission undoubtedly made my publisher very unhappy. At the same time, it left me in a daze. After the conversation, I sat unmoving at my desk for over an hour. I did not want to do anything. I did
not think I would hear from my publisher again, but I did. He called back some time later to ask me to send him what I’d been writing “to and for” Dr. Bethune. He had just talked it over with his colleagues. They were all interested in what I had come up with.

  I chose three pieces at random—“A Man Who Is of Value to the People,” “A Great Saviour,” and “A Little Girl.” I did not wait for the response.

  Two days later, I got another call from my publisher. He urged me to send him all the rest, saying they were considering publishing the stories as a book.

  “But they were not written to be published,” I said.

  My publisher lost patience with me at this point and launched into a monologue that lasted twenty minutes. He asked me to trust his judgment. Who understood the Chinese book market, him or me? His analysis was that there were several segments that would be interested in a book about Dr. Bethune’s children. In the end, he said something that hurt my self-esteem. “Your new book will be worth more than all your previous books put together.”

  I was not persuaded. I especially did not believe that readers in the digital age would be interested in what had befallen Dr. Bethune’s children. But I agreed to send him the rest in the hope that he would see his mistake.

  Satisfied with my compromise, my publisher predicted that our new project would help millions of readers rediscover their long-forgotten identity. “We are all Dr. Bethune’s children!” he said.

  “We?” I repeated sadly. A strong sense of loss hit me. In the world without Yangyang and Yinyin,“we” was an empty word that meant nothing but loneliness.

  I had already moved the cursor over Send. Travelling thousands of miles is no longer a wonder in the digital age. Just one tap on the mouse had sent my memories around the globe, to my fatherland, and your final resting place. Dear Dr. Bethune, I know that your spirit is still wandering the good earth, where most of your children are still living. I know you are eager to hear about the children you never knew. Whether these stories would “make your life a misery,” I do not know. But I can promise they “will never bore you.”(Please forgive my borrowing the words you said to the woman you married and divorced twice, which may bring sad memories to mind.) These stories will finally unveil the mystery your children have wrestled with and that I’m sure also troubled you.