‘Happy New Year!’ Tyler shouted. He lit a cherry bomb and threw it over his shoulder. The noise echoed off the windows; the sparklers sent out silvery trails; people clinked glasses and kissed. I was standing by myself, watching the swarming crowd. Walter pecked Page on the cheek. Tyler and Elena mashed themselves together and Tyler’s glasses fell into the snow. The fair-haired man who’d told the hedgehog story slipped his hand down the black-haired woman’s pants, his silver alien antennae entwined with her Carmen Miranda fruits. The students were knotted like pollywogs and the Pakistani I’d met in the hall had his eyes closed and was, presumably, flying above us all. The girl in the green cotton undershirt whirled a string attached to a tuft of burning steel wool, sending sparks flying in all directions, and when I turned a woman I didn’t know smiled at me and asked if I were pregnant.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said.
I smiled with sealed lips and walked inside. Of course I looked pregnant, I looked like a cow, and something snapped inside me after I left her. I slunk out of our white-fenced yard and down the stairs into our basement, and once I was there I wept for my lost child, my lost lives, for the houses that had given me only a stack of money in the bank. I wept, and then I ate, and when Page called my name from the top of the stairs and then turned on the light when she heard the crackle of cellophane, I cowered in my corner like a trapped opossum.
‘Grace?’ she called, already moving down the stairs. ‘Is that you? Walter’s looking for you, he wants to know if the champagne’s down here …’
She came around the corner, past the water heater, muttering something about scientists who couldn’t remember their names, and then her mouth dropped open in shock. She couldn’t see the hamper behind me; I’d blocked it with my body. But she could see all too clearly the refuse heap beneath the soapstone sink. Candy wrappers, empty bottles, torn boxes, open tins, foil and cellophane, fruit skins, jars I’d cleaned out with my fingers and tongue. Page kicked at the pile with the toe of one red shoe.
‘Jesus,’ she said. A stranger’s voice, cool and academic. ‘What are you doing?’
My hand was trapped in an open sack of glazed pecans. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. What do you want?’
‘There’s all that food upstairs,’ she said. ‘All the stuff Tyler brought. Why would you eat here?’
Why indeed. The basement was dark and damp and smelled of mold and spiderwebs. The pecans were stale. I couldn’t explain to Page or to anyone else why I needed to eat alone; for weeks, since I’d blown up again, I’d eaten like a mouse in public. I was huge, grotesque, enormous. I had no right to eat.
I stared at Page, my eyes dull and my hands dirty. From the head of the stairs I heard Walter calling. ‘Page?’ he said. ‘Is she down there?’
I froze. ‘Tell him I’ll bring the champagne up myself,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right there.’
‘She’s here,’ Page called instead. Her voice was puzzled, frightened; I don’t think she meant to be cruel. She probably assumed that Walter already knew what was going on.
But Walter didn’t know. He came down the stairs with Tyler and a student named Larry, all three of them laughing and ready to lug up boxes of liquor in their strong arms. When the three of them came upon me and Page, they stopped quite suddenly. All of them had cornered animals in the woods.
‘Holy shit,’ Tyler said. He moved closer to Page.
I hunched over my bag of glazed pecans and glared at them. Walter reached behind me and lifted the lid of the hamper and then drew a deep breath.
‘Grace,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘Leave me alone.’
I drew back against the hamper, aware that I was acting bizarrely but unable to stop myself. That corner had been my place, the only place I could call my own since I’d sold my other houses, and it was ruined now. My place, my food, my trash. I growled, I couldn’t help it. And when Page squatted down, her face inches from mine and her hand extended, I leaned over and took her hand in my mouth and held it there dumbly, like a dog.
IV
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
SEPTEMBER 1986
PATIENT: I suddenly got a pain in the chest on both sides since yesterday after supper.
DOCTOR: Any shortness of breath?
PATIENT: Yes, very difficult breathing.
DOCTOR: Have you grown angry with somebody?
PATIENT: Oh! Yes, I had a quarrel with my husband just before supper yesterday.
DOCTOR: Are you still angry?
PATIENT: Yes, he is a stubborn fellow. He never accepts other people’s advice.
DOCTOR: In Chinese traditional medicine we say there are seven kinds of emotions: joy, anger, melancholy, brooding, sorrow, fear, shock. Each of them is related to one organ. For example, anger attacks the liver and joy hurts the heart. I’ll give you a prescription for your liver, and in the meantime please be happy all the time.
—adapted from A Dialogue in the Hospitals
INCENSE BURNER PEAK
There are no straight roads in the world; we must be prepared to follow a road which twists and turns and not try to get things on the cheap.
—Mao
ZILLAH’S VOICE VANISHED with my pneumonia, which left as quickly as it had come: a drenching sweat and a plunge in my temperature, and suddenly the pain in my chest was gone and I could breathe again. I woke, hungry and thirsty and worn, to find the room cool and quiet. The flowers on my bedside table were only flowers. The blinds hung sedately over the windows, and the only sounds in the room came from the other patients. I drew the air into my lungs and slept, twenty-two hours of dreamless rest. Then I woke and ate everything Dr Yu gave me – she was there, as she’d been all along – and I had a bath. Then I slept again, another full day and night, dreaming this time of Dr Yu and her life.
I dreamed of her and her husband and children, exiled to the countryside; I dreamed of famine; I dreamed of war. The war against the Japanese, the civil war, and then the smaller battles Dr Yu and her family had survived. I dreamed of peasants planting millet on small strips of land, and then I dreamed the land gathered up and bound into communes, hoes and rakes replaced by tractors, houses carved up into rooms, backyard gardens replaced by common fields and the sun overturned in the sky by the Cultural Revolution. Without understanding why, I dreamed Dr Yu and her family spinning like pollen on a river, every motion of their lives determined by the current.
When I woke for the second time, I felt well but very confused. Dr Yu told me what day it was. ‘A week,’ she said. ‘You’ve been here for a week. Unusual vacation.’ She guided my feet into my shoes, my arms into my blouse. My limbs felt airy and weightless. I looked down at the rest of me and marveled that there was anything left. The fever had pruned me but my body was still mine, and I stroked my hips with new affection.
‘How do you feel?’ Dr Yu asked.
‘I feel good,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’
I was as weak as a newly hatched chick, but I knew that my body was healed. Beneath my slack skin and softened muscles I could feel my body rebuilding itself, although my heart was puzzled by what Zillah had brought me: the chunks of my past I’d ignored for years as I tried, each time I changed my life abruptly, to forget who I’d been before. Zillah had made me look at my life as if it belonged to someone else, and when I looked at it clearly, I was ashamed.
‘My husband has arranged for your discharge,’ Dr Yu said. ‘And Walter arrives from Canton today. We are to meet him at your hotel.’
‘Today?’ I said. ‘He’s coming today?’ Suddenly I wanted very much to see him.
‘So he says – he, two others he travels with …’
She dressed me carefully and gathered up the food and utensils and bedding she’d brought. I concentrated on moving myself. My blouse was loose. My skirt was baggy. Even my shoes felt too big. I wondered if I would have simply vanished, had I gone into this illness thin.
&nbs
p; ‘You can walk?’ Dr Yu said. She took my elbow and raised me and then, after I’d stood for a minute, she let me go. I took a few tentative steps across the polished wooden floor. The grain swirled mysteriously through the layers of wax and varnish, forming faces and landscapes and words. The sunlight fell in a wide wedge that solidified part of the air.
‘I can walk,’ I told Dr Yu. ‘Absolutely. I feel almost like myself.’
‘We took good care of you,’ she said. ‘But it is nothing. It is of no consequence. You are our guest.’
When she spoke I remembered something else from my lost week. ‘You were talking to me,’ I said hesitantly. Another voice besides Zillah’s had been whispering in my ear, feeding me the material that had powered my last dreams. ‘You were telling me things,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you?’
The nurse moved to the end of the room and began changing some dressings on a patient’s chest. ‘I maybe said a few things,’ Dr Yu said quietly. ‘Just to tie your mind here while you dream. You remember this?’
I closed my eyes and concentrated. What had she said? Her sister, her father, her mother’s work, a time when she’d gone to school – there was nothing I could hold onto. Nothing concrete.
I’d listened so hard to my own life that I’d lost hers. ‘It’s gone,’ I said. ‘Whatever it was. What was it?’
‘All in good time,’ she said. ‘Perhaps some will return to you.’
I reached back to straighten my collar, and as I did I touched my hair. Dr Yu winced when I pulled the tangled rope over my shoulders. Knots, mats, nests, snarls – I held the mass in front of me and examined it. A muddy tan, gold no more, lusterless and dry. My hair had been my chief vanity.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dr Yu said. ‘The nurses and I tried all week to keep it combed and washed. But your hair tangles so easily. It is nothing like ours.’
I smiled as best as I could – it was only my hair – and I let the ruined rope fall behind me. ‘We will cut it,’ Dr Yu said. ‘It is the only cure. We will give you a modern style, very short and light, like my daughter’s.’
I nodded docilely and followed her out of the ward. We stopped at a wooden desk downstairs, where I found that Walter had already taken care of the bill. I signed a few forms and Dr Yu signed a few others, and then we stepped outside into the cool, smoggy air. A clean white Datsun waited for us.
‘I arranged for a cab,’ Dr Yu said. ‘Walter sent some extra money for your care, along with payment for the bill. We’ll go to your hotel and make you comfortable. One quick stop on the way.’
So Walter hadn’t forgotten me. Somewhere in Canton, in a room I couldn’t imagine in a city I’d never seen, he had taken the trouble to wire money, make arrangements, think of me. This, after all I’d done to him. An image of Hank, which I’d buried for months, floated by. I pushed it away. I leaned back against the slipcovered seat and rested my head on the antimacassar while Dr Yu talked to the driver. The driver smiled in the mirror at me. The image of Hank floated back.
‘We’ll stop at the market on Wangfujing,’ said Dr Yu. ‘For one minute only.’
‘Fine,’ I said. The sidewalks were covered with peddlers: boys selling freshly popped corn and rice, an old woman squatting over a tray of roots and herbs, a young man selling tapes of Taiwanese pop singers. When the cab stopped, Dr Yu darted into the covered market and I rested and watched the crowd. The driver turned around and spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand him.
‘I’ve been sick,’ I told him, patting my chest with my palm. ‘I had pneumonia.’
He wore a gray tunic, crisp and starched, and a flat blue cap. He patted his own chest in response. ‘Ner-mone-ee-yar?’ he said, and then he laughed at the alien syllables. I laughed with him and then tried to mime a cough, a sore chest, a fever. By the time Dr Yu returned, we were gesturing like monkeys.
‘Success!’ she said. She brandished a pair of scissors and then spoke briefly to the driver, who tried to repeat the strange word I’d taught him. Dr Yu nodded. ‘Shi,’ she said. Yes. ‘Ta hao le.’ I think she told him I’d be all right; I recognized hao: good. Dr Yu turned back to me as the driver wove his way through the crowded streets. ‘You rest,’ she said. ‘We will be there in one hour.’
I fell asleep, completely secure in her care.
At the hotel, the manager greeted us as if I’d been gone for a year instead of a week.
‘You are well?’ he said anxiously. ‘You are cured?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘We have greatly apologize for your disease,’ he said. He led me up to the room Walter and I had left the week before. ‘We cleanse everything, very completeness, for death to all germs. Hoping you are not blaming this inadequate guest house.’
He was visibly nervous, as if he feared his job hung in the balance. I told him his hotel was fine, and that it had nothing to do with my illness. He relaxed a bit.
‘Hot water here,’ he said, pointing out a large flowered thermos. ‘Tea, drinking cups, boiled cool water …’
‘Laundry?’ I said. ‘Do you think I could get some clothes washed?’ My clothes lay where I’d left them, but they’d been folded in my absence: picked up carefully, shaken out, the surfaces beneath them cleaned; then replaced with the arms and legs bent and crossed. A blouse on a chair, a skirt on the floor, dresses marching down one bed and shoes neatly upright here and there across the rug, reproaching me. My mother had always said to leave strange rooms just the way I found them, as if each time I closed the door behind me might be my last. For once I wished I’d followed her advice.
‘Our great pleasure,’ the manager said, and then he waited while I gathered an armful of clothes and tucked them into the laundry bag. ‘All was respected,’ he said gently. He seemed to sense my discomfort. ‘None was disturbed. We cleanse by two hours. Three at latest.’
He closed the door behind him and left me alone with Dr Yu. She wandered around the room, fingering the white drapes, the tan upholstered chairs, the beds and the metal console between them, which had taken me hours to figure out. She pushed one button and lights came on over the beds. She pushed another and the radio blared. ‘Most amazing,’ she said. I realized this was the first time she’d seen one of the guest rooms. She drifted into the bathroom and ran the taps and flushed the toilet.
‘Where do you think Walter is?’ I called.
She emerged from the bathroom wiping her hands on a thick towel, which she then refolded carefully. ‘Amazing,’ she repeated. ‘Extremely hot water on demand, at all hours of day. And such a deep tub. And visitors’ soaps …’ She held out a stack of smooth pink soap bars wrapped in creamy paper. In his house in Cambridge, Uncle Owen had kept round Spanish soaps wrapped in pleated paper and tied with flat ribbons. ‘We cannot stay here,’ Dr Yu said. ‘Even if one night’s room did not cost one month’s salary, even if Foreign Exchange Currency was not needed for payment. It is completely disapproved.’
‘Who’s “we”?’ I asked. ‘You mean you and me?’
‘Us – Chinese citizens. Some places like this, even overseas Chinese are not allowed.’
‘But the staff is Chinese.’
She shrugged. ‘They select those of good background and loyalty, then teach them to guard against foreign influences. “Spiritual pollution,” they call it. We had a campaign against this several years ago, which Deng launched. “Guard against corrupt and decadent ideologies of exploiting classes,” he said. “Guard against stinking bourgeois life-styles.”’ She laughed. ‘Guard against this soap, he means. But you are here, smooth pink soap is here, tourists are here with clothes and cameras. Some of us go to meetings in places like this. Of course we see. Of course we want.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, the government pulled back when the campaign interfered with business. We were told to take from the West what is good and leave the bad behind. Take technical knowledge. Leave ideas.’
She put the soap down with a sharp crack. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Enough politics. Walter should be here in two
or three hours, but first we will get some air – fresh air is curative. We will go for a walk and I will show you something from when I was a student.’
‘That sounds good,’ I said. ‘Let me take a quick shower first.’
‘Wet your hair,’ she said. ‘Do not dry it. We will fix it before we go.’
When I came out of the bathroom she wrapped a towel around my neck and shoulders and cut off my hair with the scissors she’d bought. Snip, snip – she left it all one length, pushed behind my ears and level with my chin. Then she toweled what was left and combed it and smoothed it with a drop of conditioner until it came alive again and began to gleam. I watched in the mirror, interested despite myself. I hadn’t worn my hair short since Zillah’s death.
‘There,’ she said. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s good,’ I said. No pins, clips, barrettes, or scarves; no fuss. Just a smooth blond cap that made me look young. ‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Maybe I should have done this before.’
‘Could be,’ Dr Yu said. ‘You are regretful?’
‘Not at all,’ I said.
Because it was daylight, and because I was with Dr Yu, the park that had rebuffed my nighttime exploration ten days earlier opened to me now. We walked on winding paths through the park, past dusty flower beds and tiny houses and small pavilions and pagodas. Many of these were in ruins, chipped and shattered and plastered over with notices I couldn’t read, but a few had been restored with gold leaf and paint and one was under construction that afternoon. Three women on rickety ladders were repainting the stylized chrysanthemums and the decorative borders and the tiny landscape scenes, and a man was repairing some broken tiles while another scraped layers of handbills and notices from the lower walls. I stopped to watch, amazed that they were doing everything by hand, but the sight made Dr Yu impatient.
The Middle Kingdom Page 19