Only once the servant was out of sight did Widow Liu resume the conversation. “Where was your mission up north?”
“In a town called Lu-cho Fu,” Poppy said, “near T’ai-yüan. You’ve heard of that city?”
Widow Liu blinked at them. “I am not an idiot.”
Addie bit her lip, and was surprised to see that Poppy was blushing. “Of course, I didn’t mean to suggest that, Widow Liu.” She seemed ready to say more, but several seconds passed, and she didn’t speak again. Their host continued to stare at them steadily.
“We know Shansi well,” Addie jumped in, “but it’s far away. Up there, no one is very aware of the whole south of China. It seems you don’t have a similar problem here.”
“There are as many ignorant peasants here as there are anywhere else. I assumed you would know that I am not an ignorant peasant. I may not go out into the world anymore, but I know what the world is.” She leaned forward and took her cup of tea from the small table between them. Tipping the lid away from her lips, she examined it without drinking, then lowered the cup to her lap. “Please,” she said, nodding slightly, and both Addie and Poppy reached forward. “This is tsao-peichien. It’s grown in the mountains west of here.”
“It’s very good,” Addie said, taking a sip.
“Yes, it’s one of the finest in all of China. You know, of course, that we are famous for our tea production. All this”—she waved a hand around the room—“is in consequence of tea.”
“You mean your husband’s business was tea,” Addie said.
“Yes, and opium. The demand for each is not equal.”
Poppy cleared her throat. “You know, of course, that part of our business in China is to eradicate the population’s fascination with the drug.”
“How interesting. When the foreigners are selling it to us, opium isn’t considered dangerous at all. Yet when we’re growing it and selling it ourselves, it’s a plague on the land.”
“I don’t require a history lesson,” Poppy said.
“No?” The widow blinked at her, amused. “I might have thought you did.” She paused and then went on, “In any case, all this was my husband’s, and now I am in charge. My sons help me manage it, of course.” She moved her hands together as if clapping, though they didn’t make a sound.
“That’s a rare case here in China,” Poppy put in. “Women aren’t often allowed that kind of responsibility, in my experience.”
“I doubt that your experience of China is complete enough to speak on the rarity of my situation.”
Poppy sat forward on the bench, and Addie could feel the anger rising off her, a sudden heat, a sharp tang. “It’s true that I wasn’t raised in China, but I’ve lived here for many years, Widow Liu, and in that time I’ve seen enough of the way your people treat their women to know it isn’t right. I’ve seen wives made slaves to their husbands, daughters bought and sold as property. Infant girls killed for the crime of failing to be born as boys—drowned, or dashed against a wall so their heads are broken—”
“You’ve seen this?” Widow Liu interrupted. “With your own eyes, you’ve seen an infant killed in this fashion?”
Poppy sat back an inch. “No, not with my own eyes. But I’ve seen—”
“Or drowned? Have you seen one drowned?”
“No, I have not actually been present for such a, a”—she took a ragged breath, and then another, searching for the word she wanted; it was the first time Addie had seen her Chinese fail her—“a pitiable event.”
“I should think not. That would be very shocking for a mother to invite an audience to view the murder of her child.” Widow Liu shook her head. “And, you know, I would use a stronger word to describe the act. ‘Gruesome,’ perhaps—a gruesome event. ‘Pitiable’ is insufficient.” She cocked her head to the side. “Don’t you agree?”
Poppy didn’t respond. When Addie looked over, she saw that her friend had shut her eyes and was shaking her head.
“And you?” the widow asked, turning to her. “Do you agree that ‘pitiable’ is not a strong enough word to use in this situation? Of course, since she never saw this act with her own eyes, perhaps your friend is uncomfortable using stronger language.” She smoothed the skirts over her lap. Her satisfaction with the conversation was evident in every movement of her hands, which she looked at with fondness. “Luckily, I don’t have that same reservation. I will say that for a mother to kill an infant is a despicable act, a horrible act, a gruesome and unforgivable and disgusting act.” She paused, and a heavy stillness covered the room. “But despite all that, it is an act that is performed every day in China. Countless times, no doubt.”
Poppy’s eyes, now open, blinked rapidly. “You don’t dispute that?”
“Not at all. You think I don’t know the Chinese people as well as you do? Better, dear one, better. Our empire’s greatness lies in its respect for tradition, but taken too far, this respect is also a weakness. I see you recognize the truth of this statement. Yet I would not have you think you have an understanding of the situation. In fact, you draw the lines too starkly.”
“But you agree that women and girls are treated deplorably here?”
“Of course they are—sometimes. Perhaps often. As I’m sure is the case in your own land. What was the name of that woman who was bludgeoned to death by her husband? There was a case in New York not four months ago.”
“I haven’t heard of it,” Poppy said.
“And you?”
Addie shook her head.
“And yet surely you’ve received letters from home during that time. The news is not worth passing on when the situation is not unique.” Widow Liu glanced wearily to one side, and Addie saw that her gaze had fallen on a clock that sat on a table against the wall. Addie recognized it as a Gallet & Co. mantel model. She wondered where it had come from, how it had ended up here.
“Where did you hear this—this story?” she asked.
“Ah.” Widow Liu swatted a hand before her face. “I am familiar with several foreign newspapers. I require an adequate translation, of course, but as I said before, everyone comes to see me.” She yawned grandly, without bothering to hide it by turning her face. “What is your specific request, by the way? How much money do you require?”
Addie and Poppy glanced quickly at each other. “We haven’t come to beg for money,” Addie said. “We came at your invitation.”
Poppy added, “But it’s true that a donation would not go to waste.”
“To fund the girls’ school?”
“If you wish.”
“In general, foreigners have not brought very much of value to our land. It is the opposite: you have taken away a great deal.” She stared at each of them in turn, waiting to see if they would contradict her. They both remained silent. “Only in education have you made a positive change. Particularly in building schools for girls. This is something we’ve lacked.” She reached for the cup of tea, but then held it before her without drinking. “Forgive me if I don’t thank you for the gift, since we’ve given you so many gifts in exchange.”
“I wonder if you confuse us,” Poppy said, “for mercantilists. We are missionaries, Widow Liu. These are two distinct groups.”
“Are they?” She laughed, disturbing the cup in her hand. Some of the tea spilled onto the saucer. “I believe that many of us fail to notice the difference. Perhaps you are too subtle.”
“Anyone confused by the matter is welcome to come and listen to what we have to say. Our converts are quite clear about our purpose.”
“And your converts represent a very, very small sliver of the population. But let us stop arguing. I am tired with the conversation. I am not a Christian, but neither do I see your faith as any kind of threat to me. Your god is no challenge to my gods. They can live side by side.”
Poppy and Addie left without any specific promise from the widow that she would give them money. “She certainly doesn’t seem interested in being converted,” Addie observed as they were
following the boy back to the mission. He had been waiting by the door when they came out, as if he knew exactly how long the visit would last.
“Not at all,” Poppy said. She laughed, but it was clear that she was unsettled by the widow’s treatment of her.
After a pause, Addie remarked that Poppy had been more vehement in her defense of the mission’s work than she generally was in other home visits.
“Perhaps Chungking is making me into a strident crusader,” her friend replied with a wry smile. “By the end of two months, I’ll be like Julia Riddell.”
“Or like Owen,” Addie said. As soon as she’d spoken, she regretted the joke.
All through the fall and into the winter, Addie was visited by memories as vivid as the trances of an opium smoker. She didn’t know where these memories came from, or why they struck her as powerfully as they did. They had the sensation of dreams, a crackle like electricity in the air before the purple lightning comes climbing out of the clouds. But dreams were alloys of accident and imagination that dissolved too easily. Her memories had substance, the weight of truth.
They came to her throughout the day, as she was leading a prayer group in one of their congregants’ homes, as she climbed the steep stairs of Chungking’s streets, as she lay down beside Poppy in the bed they now shared at night. They delivered themselves to her consciousness wholly formed. An image from when she was eight or nine years old: flinging herself into the stuffed chair in the little alcove off the stairs. An oblong of light had fallen over the page she was reading in the Gospel of Luke. It was summer, and hot. From the kitchen came the sounds of a spoon scraping over a pan and the girl singing softly to herself. A fly alit on Addie’s knee, and abruptly she was filled with a feeling of transportation, of transcendence. She was enraptured with all of God’s creations: the fly, the hot white light from the window, the scrap of song from the kitchen, the pages of the Bible blotting with sweat from her fingers . . .
This memory visited her in the moment she was filling a cloth bag with oranges to take to a family who lived down the hill from the mission house. She tried to think if there had been a scent of oranges that day years before, in the old home in Marietta. But they couldn’t have possibly had citrus at that time of year.
Another day, ducking beneath a sagging clothesline down near the wharf, she suddenly recalled gray shapes moving through the water off the side of a ship almost a decade before. She was carrying Freddie then. She hadn’t yet told Owen. But he was standing beside her on the steamer’s deck, and he took her hand and used it to point at the dolphins chasing along beside them in the water. “Let’s see if they follow us all the way to China,” he said, and for half a day it seemed that they might.
One night she’d walked her newborn son around the darkened courtyard for hours. Li K’ang’s sister Hsi-yung had come out, just in case Addie wanted to be relieved, and she hadn’t said a word, but Addie had been glad for the assurance of her presence . . .
There was a picnic long ago in a field of flowers, a three-legged race whose start she signaled by raising her arms, a little dog snuffling her ankles with its wet nose . . .
And Owen meeting her eye across a crowd that had assembled to hear a reverend from Boston lecture about the Great Call to Foreign Missions. It is time for the flame of Christianity to burn brightly in every home, whether it be a tent in the Sahara or a house built upon stilts on some tiny island in the Pacific . . . Rain had beat the windows and run down in rivulets, and inside the hall a cloud of pipe smoke had settled near the wooden beams of the ceiling . . .
All these memories and others descended upon her brain during the months when she was settling into Chungking. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason in the selection; they raised different emotions within her that ranged from regret to longing to joy. “What are you thinking of?” Poppy would ask when she got a faraway look on her face. It was too difficult to explain because the past was the past. At first she said, “Nothing.” And then, after a while: “Our future.” Which satisfied Poppy, even if it was the opposite of the truth.
Juanlan
20
In mid-August, the river is rising. In town, it has spread like a hand widening its span, covering the banks and sloshing up onto Jiangnan Lu. The road is technically closed, but motorbike drivers still venture down, edging their way past the water, mud squelching beneath their tires. It is something to be this close to a flood. Things are not as bad here as they are in the east, but it is the same water, the same element building its strength. The Duoyu Jiang feeds the Dadu He. Which eventually feeds the Chang Jiang. Trace the watery paths on a map, and they lead east to Shanghai, to the busy coast. But here is where it starts.
On the main bridge, people lean over the railings and toss detritus into the brown waves, just to see the river carry it quickly away. Tissues, plastic bottles. Anything that floats. They drop things into the water and exclaim to one another at how fast they are gone. Juanlan doesn’t throw anything into the water. Lulu does. Every evening, they take a walk together and her sister-in-law tosses down whatever is at hand. Tonight it is a handful of sunflower seed shells. “You can’t even see them,” Juanlan protests.
“Maybe you can’t.”
“But you can?”
Lulu has one hand on the railing. Her belly is larger now, and she has to angle herself sideways. “See? There they are.” She is pointing at nothing. There is only the rust-brown water moving swiftly along. Without turning her eyes from the river, she asks how Juanlan’s father is doing.
“Better today than yesterday.” The day before, he had fallen while trying to descend the front steps of the hotel. She was tutoring Wei Ke, and when she returned for lunch, her parents were both at the hospital. “My mother was really angry with him,” she tells Lulu, “because he was trying to hang up his birdcage on the sidewalk, and he’s not supposed to attempt the stairs by himself.”
Lulu gives her a look. “He’s probably really bored. Maybe he just wanted to do something on his own, for a change.”
Juanlan frowns. She is ready to remark that her father’s condition is not the same as Lulu’s, that if Lulu does not appreciate her mother-in-law’s concern for her health, that doesn’t mean she knows what is best for her father-in-law, too. But Juanlan doesn’t want to anger her, and changes the subject: “I heard from Du Xian,” she says.
“And?”
“He wants to come visit for National Day.”
This is not exactly true. The letter did not say anything about coming to Heng’an. It only said that they should take advantage of the holiday to see each other. Du Xian’s company is giving them one day of vacation plus the weekend to travel, which is not very much time, considering it takes twelve hours by bus to get from Chongqing to Heng’an. In his letter he didn’t acknowledge this as any impediment.
“Would you introduce him to your parents if he came here?” Lulu asks. “Would he stay at the Three Springs?”
“I don’t know how I’d keep him a secret. I guess I’d have to tell them, wouldn’t I?”
“No, you could tell him to rent a room and then never let your parents see the two of you together.”
Juanlan glances at Lulu, unsure whether she is being serious or joking. Her sister-in-law is wide-eyed, a caricature of naïveté. “So you think I should tell them?”
“Of course.” Lulu turns her face to the water again. Her eyes follow the flight of a plastic bag sifting down to the surface, tossed by a little boy held in his father’s arms. Juanlan looks at the boy, but Lulu keeps her eyes fixed on the plastic bag. “If you’re planning on staying with Du Xian, you should tell your parents about him.”
“If I’m planning on staying with him?”
“Yes, ‘if.’” She looks up from the water, blinking. “You might have another boyfriend by now. I don’t know.”
She is speaking of Rob, of course. It’s the first time she’s brought him up since he left a few weeks ago. When Juanlan first told her that Rob had lef
t, Lulu’s mouth dropped open. What is it between them, she wonders? The two of them spent no more than ten minutes alone together the day of the bike ride. Rob is nearly fifty years old, Lulu is pregnant, and they don’t share a common language. Absurd to think that they might be attracted to each other—except that Lulu’s nonchalance, mentioning him in conversation, is unconvincing. Even now, blinking at Juanlan, she seems almost to be offering up her own longing, wanting her to see it.
“I don’t have another boyfriend,” Juanlan says firmly.
Lulu remains silent for a moment. Then she turns away. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’m sick of being here.”
Zhuo Ge stops by the flat on his way home from work that evening, and they sit in the living room, their mother and Juanlan on the sofa and Zhuo Ge on a tiny stool pulled up to the table. Their father has retired to the bedroom to rest. The doctor said to keep his leg elevated as much as possible until the swelling goes down.
The fruit bowl holds a few apples, and Zhuo Ge goes to work peeling one of them with a switchblade while their mother tells the story of their father’s fall. “He yelled when he hit the steps,” she says, “and it made my heart stop. Of course, the yelling was really a good thing. He didn’t make a sound that other time.” She nods, looking from Juanlan to Zhuo Ge, who is eating the apple off the knife.
“I would have been worried, too, if I heard that,” Juanlan says.
“Everything was all right here when you came back?”
“Everything was fine.”
“And how was Xiao Lu tonight?”
Juanlan glances at Zhuo Ge. He shrugs as if to say that there is only so much a man can do, or know, when it comes to his pregnant wife.
“We took a stroll on the bridge,” Juanlan says, noncommittal. “Then she went home.”
“You didn’t accompany her?”
Zhuo Ge takes another apple from the bowl. “Ma, she’s fine. It’s only a couple of blocks back to our place.”
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