Little Gods

by Meng Jin

  It was dated the third of February 1987. It was the final letter in the pile, and the only one that overtly expressed a desire:

  I want to make some things clear. I intend to make you my wife. It is undeniable that we are well matched. I think you will agree.

  This letter was not one of the fourteen that included the word 爱.

  The stairwell lights were off, the windows were dark. It was too late to go knocking on anyone’s door.

  I left, walked until I saw the lit-up sign of a hostel, and got myself a single room. At the foot of the hard bed a radiator pumped out waves of singed heat. I wrapped the blankets around my shoulders, shivering, and dozed until afternoon.

  The next day I returned to the building. It was late evening and a few window lights still blazed bright. I was not alone on the street. I watched the people appearing from and disappearing into the stairwell, staring hard, trying to discern their qualities. A couple walked past me, talking animatedly, and ascended hand in hand. Their steps echoed and quieted. Three people came down, separately, then two together, followed by two more going up. I told myself to follow but could not motivate my legs to move. I stood and watched the window lights go out one by one. I stood until the pool of lamplight around me disappeared with a click.

  The next morning I put the final letter in my backpack. In the tiny hostel room, which was just big enough to fit one twin bed, which had a slanted ceiling so I couldn’t stand up straight without hitting my head, I rearranged my few belongings and rearranged them again, delaying my departure. By the time I convinced my body to face the city the pimpled receptionist was drowsy from lunch. The noodle shops and cafeterias were empty, tables littered with used napkins and piles of bones. I roused the owner to take my order. I ate, I paid. Darkness set early.

  I walked small roads until I reached Beijing University. On the map it looked close, just four or five blocks, but these blocks were eternity. The sidewalks were slick with ice. The main avenue, a river wide, could be crossed only via a raised bridge. Outside the university walls I turned down the block lined with barren young trees, into a courtyard behind the road, and not letting myself pause for breath or hesitation, walked to the stairs of the building I had stood outside for two nights without entering, whose address appeared on the letter inside my bag, along with a room number: 303. The stairwell was weakly lit and grimy and smelled like dust and piss. From above, voices echoed—teenagers discussing something trivial with casual animation. At each floor peeling posters papered the entrance to the main hall. Flaked paint dusted the corners of the landings. On the third floor I stopped and turned down the hall.

  Nineteen eighty-seven? The young man said. He was thin and tall and stood in the doorway looking at me with his head cocked to one side.

  This is a student dorm, he explained.

  Indeed—behind the door of room 303 were three sets of bunk beds with metal frames, lining parallel walls of the narrow room. Books and clothes and shoes and empty takeout containers lay about with a carelessness I recognized from my own brief collegiate life. Between the beds a group of five or six boys huddled around a small wooden table, where two of them were playing chess. The chubby one in a red shirt made a move and sat back, looking over at the door.

  No wonder this building is falling apart, he said, it’s older than I am.

  His opponent, who had a long skinny face and rectangular glasses, called out to the one at the door.

  Feng, don’t be rude. Invite the lady in.

  Inside, clothes were swept to the foot of a bed and I was motioned to sit.

  Who did you say you were looking for again? one of the game watchers said.

  Glasses made a move and a commotion erupted.

  His queen!

  Too late now—

  Will you all shut up and just watch?

  You idiot—

  I’m looking for a man named Zhang Bo, I said.

  Hey, Jian, you know anyone named Zhang Bo?

  Let me think—Zhang Bo, Zhang Bo—isn’t that tall guy in our class with the fancy computer called Zhang something?

  That’s Zhang Bei, you idiot—

  He was a student here in the nuclear physics department, I said.

  Red Shirt lifted his arm to make a move and for a moment everyone quieted. He dropped his arm without touching a piece. A groan of exasperation followed.

  Guo, you’re in the physics department—know a Zhang Bo?

  Nope, Glasses said, can’t think of a single classmate named Zhang.

  Nineteen eighty-seven! said Feng, the boy who opened the door. He was a student here in 1987! Do any of you have ears?

  That’s before I was born, another boy said, as if that settled the matter.

  Me too, I said.

  Zhang Bo, Zhang Bo, Glasses was repeating, as he hunched over the chessboard, eyeing the pieces. The name does sound familiar.

  He’d be—the boy named Feng said—something like forty years old, forty-five?

  An old man—

  Your dad’s age—

  Red Shirt made a move. Glasses picked up his queen and placed it down firmly two squares to the left. Checkmate, he said, and stood up. He stepped away from the table, where the other boys were bent over the board talking over each other, gesticulating, where Red Shirt sat with his brow furrowed.

  Zhang Bo, Glasses said to me. Do you mean Professor Zhang? I’ve got electromagnetic theory with Professor Zhang tomorrow morning. I think he went to Beida for his bachelor’s. Maybe it’s him.

  A collective shout of discontent rose from the chess watchers. Glasses looked back, ready to reenter the mix and claim his victory. Before he went, he instructed me to meet him the next day at ten. He would take me to the university to meet Professor Zhang.

  Is that him? Glasses, whose name was something-Guo, whispered in my ear. We sat in the back of a large lecture hall, watching a small man write equations on a chalkboard.

  I should have been in my own classes. Suddenly I was reminded that I had been a student, with a life, with a direction in my life (I was moving into the future). In fact I’d forgotten that time had continued to pass in the world I left behind. The future had vanished after my mother died. I had entered another world where time moved in a circle and the participant could enter wherever she liked.

  The last time I’d checked my email, a few days before coming to China, my inbox had been swelling with concerned and increasingly stern emails from advisers, professors, university administrators. There was an email from my roommate saying that some people from the college had come to empty out my things. I responded to nothing. Everything about that world felt ridiculous. Despite the evidence I could not imagine it continuing on, could not imagine students walking over the green lawns to their classes, eating meals in the cafeteria, groping one another at parties, falling asleep in the library, all while I traveled to the apartment where my mother had died and then to the cold room where they’d kept her corpse. What had been the point of that world? Of living in it? Who had I been, that girl so eager to leave her mother?

  The man standing at the front of the lecture hall wrote and spoke. His voice was all sound. Numbers and symbols appeared on the blackboard. He turned around. I leaned forward, looking into his face.

  Is that him?

  I hadn’t signed up for physics classes in my university. I had convinced myself that truth was more than invisible particles interacting as my mother believed, that being alive was more than a meeting of matter, electricity, and force. I had convinced myself that my mother’s way of seeing the world (grounded in objectivity, evidence, material fact) was simplistic and crude. Once I had told my mother what I thought in these exact words. She’d looked at me with amusement and said, You’re stupid after all.

  Is that him? the boy named Guo asked again. I don’t know if I answered yes or no.

  The lecture ended and Professor Zhang gathered his things. A student approached the lectern, followed by another. I stepped into the shadows and w
aited for them to leave. Finally the hall was empty. He walked out alone, nose buried in a stack of papers. I followed. He went down the hall, up the stairs, down the hall again. He reached for the handle of what appeared to be an office door. I called out:

  Professor, I—

  He was not my father. I thought he was not in the lecture hall, and now, as I moved closer, I was sure.

  He wore a collared white shirt and brown pants, and round metal glasses that made his eyes look small. In the lecture hall, I had leaned forward, trying to read his face, and they’d glinted off the ceiling light and made me blink. His hair was half white but thick and unruly like a teenage boy’s, his face unshaven, the kind of man who did not care how he was found.

  He turned and saw me.

  Did his eyes widen?

  He opened his mouth—then stopped whatever it was in his throat.

  You are . . . ? he said instead.

  I know who you are, I said.

  What I meant was, I know who you are not.

  It wasn’t that I felt nothing looking at Professor Zhang. Certainly I did feel something. I’d like to call it disappointment, but it was more like relief.

  Professor Zhang was not good-looking, but he was not ugly either. His face had a pleasant quality, the kind that came from smiling often, from giving people the benefit of the doubt. He laughed but not in a mean or condescending way. He folded his papers under his arm and turned fully to face me.

  Are you in my class?

  Professor, I began again.

  But I could not continue. I stood there searching for some sign of shock or curiosity in his eyes. I pulled the letter from my bag and handed it to him.

  He crinkled his eyebrows, almost tenderly, and took it.

  His expression did not change. He did not look surprised, which meant either that he had seen the letter before or that he had not. Or perhaps, despite his kind-looking face, he was a shrewd manipulator of emotion and hid himself well. I’d always hated it when people equated niceness with innocence, though of course I did it myself. Professor Zhang could look like a nice man, but that didn’t mean he was dumb.

  Many minutes passed, and Professor Zhang did not say a thing. Other professor-aged men walked past and went into rooms along the hall. A few students strolled by, chatting excitedly, gesticulating with their arms. Was he waiting for me to speak, to explain? Was he remembering?

  I looked at the plaque on the door behind him. It said Zhang Bo, Nuclear Physics. The door was made of polished brown wood, its handle painted gold.

  Were you in love with her? I blurted.

  He looked up.

  He sighed.

  Come on in, he said, and pushed open the door.

  His office was cluttered with newspapers and books and smelled like day-old oil. Behind his wooden desk a large window was decorated with a drooping plant. Professor Zhang gestured toward two chairs by the door flanking a small table with a ceramic ashtray. He asked if I wanted tea. He pinched leaves into a thin plastic cup, filled it with hot water from a thermos on the floor, and brought it over by its rim. He did not have tea himself; he gulped down a cup of plain hot water and sat with his hands clasped loosely. Among the papers and notes and diagrams, a photograph of a boy toddler in yellow shoes was pinned to a board on the wall.

  Professor Zhang said, We were good friends.

  He said, You look like him.

  He said, They were a good-looking couple.

  He said all this as if in a business meeting, blandly pleasant and without discernible emotion. He looked up at me and his face sagged.

  You look like her too.

  He continued:

  They were both my good friends. We were all classmates.

  He shook his head as if clearing it. He said, What do you want from me?

  I didn’t respond. He looked at the letter in his hand.

  Your mother and I were laoxiang, our hometowns just half a day’s walk away, then we both went to university here, at Beida. She was a brilliant woman. I was stupid, a kid. All I knew then was that I was old enough to start trying to find a wife, and there she was. It didn’t mean anything.

  He handed the letter back, folded into thirds, and smiled—a real smile, pressing in all the wrinkles in his cheeks.

  So, is it true? he said, hunching his shoulders, leaning in, looking at once eager and afraid. Are they back?

  They?

  The pronoun struck from behind. I repeated the word and again it ambushed me. Suddenly I understood that this man knew nothing. This man knew even less than I.

  Your mother and father, he said. Did they come back to China? I thought—some time ago I thought I saw . . .

  Perhaps he saw my panic. Perhaps I was starting to get up, my hands shaking, my mouth opening and closing. The voice that came out was one that hardly realized it was speaking.

  I was hoping you could tell me, it was saying, about my father. I was hoping you would—

  His confusion made me angry. It made me hate him. It made me want to push my chair to the floor and spit in the grass-green tea he’d poured me.

  I said: Yes. Yes, they’re back.

  Yes, they are back.

  They have come to Beijing this month. They are—going into business.

  Professor Zhang blinked and ran his fingers under his eyes. I looked straight at him. His weakness egged me on:

  They are working on—on a new technology with a Chinese venture capitalist, a machine that combines both their fields of expertise, physics and medicine (as I said it, I realized it was true, my father had been a doctor, in the trunk with his photographs there had been a doctor’s coat and stethoscope, many medical textbooks). It—I paused, reaching for some obscure fact, some glob of scientific nonsense—the technology aims to use Cherenkov light to treat late-stage tumors noninvasively.

  Professor Zhang murmured, Lanlan was always interested in optics.

  Mom’s a tenacious woman, I continued. I said Mom in English and the rest of the sentence in Chinese, I said it like I was from Hong Kong and had gone to international school, like some hip cosmopolitan mongrel.

  These investments are hard to land, but she gave such convincing pitches that the investors were lining up to give her money. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Daddy’s an expert in cancer treatment.

  They’re very rich, I said, emphasizing my new pronoun.

  I looked disdainfully around the office, at the drooping plant, at his simple clothes, at the thin plastic cup in my hand, hoping to illustrate to Professor Zhang his relative poverty. Cruelty was so easy, it was exhilarating. I tossed the letter with the marriage proposal on the table next to the ashtray and widened my eyes.

  We were going through some old junk, since we’re selling the apartment in Shanghai. That’s how I found this.

  Long moments passed, listening to the sound of breath. My tea turned light brown, the leaves unfurled and sunk to the bottom.

  I haven’t thought about them in so long, Professor Zhang said at last. So they’re happy? Happy and healthy? I’m glad. I’m so glad.

  We continued to talk; the professor asked questions about my mother’s life and I supplied answers. I became an expert at inventing, I filled in the negative image of my mother’s life, perhaps as I’d always imagined it might have gone, if she had been a different person, less stubborn, more ambitious for worldly things, if she had wanted anything instead of wanting nothing. If—I had the thought and pushed it away—if she hadn’t had me, or had someone else to help her raise me, or if I’d been a better daughter, more self-sufficient, more supportive, more like an adult. In this alternate life my mother quickly finished her PhD and obtained a professorship at an American university, then quit academia for industry because it paid better and gave her freer rein. I went on to describe my father, Daddy, as I called him; I spoke of his medical practice and all the patients he’d saved. I talked for so long that Professor Zhang forgot lunch and had to run to catch his afternoon class. After he left, apol
ogizing, thanking me hastily for the visit, I stood dumbfounded in the hall, staring at his name on the door. When I finally left the university I was exhausted. It was evening. My heels dragged on the pavement and I stumbled over nothing. Somehow I reached my hostel.

  My father’s a well-known doctor in America, I said to Professor Zhang. He is—I tried to remember and translate the titles of the medical textbooks from the Shanghai trunk—a radiologist. His specialty is—liver cancer. It’s a very big problem in China.

  I asked: And your wife, Professor Zhang, what does she do?

  Somehow, I was back in the professor’s office, drinking hot tea from a plastic cup. It was evening, the sky was purple, Professor Zhang should have been leaving work to have dinner with his family. I hadn’t planned to come here, but when I woke, full of energy, I started to walk and found myself at the university just as the sun was setting. I hadn’t expected him to be in his office but he was. He had looked confused when he opened the door but now seemed genuinely pleased.

  My wife is a high school physics teacher, Professor Zhang says. We’re sure our son is going to run straight away from physics when he grows up.

  His son was nine years old, in the third grade, a loud, energetic boy with enthusiasm for trucks and cars and impatience for homework. He was small for his age. Professor Zhang looked forward to the boy growing up; he hoped his excess energy would be channeled into getting taller.

  You should come sometime for dinner, meet my family, he said. I’m a decent cook.

  He didn’t ask me why I’d come back to his office. He didn’t mention the letter or the visit the day before. He treated me like an old friend he was glad to see, requiring no explanation at all.

  We talked about what I was studying in college (history?), if I had a boyfriend (no), how I kept up my Chinese after spending most of my life abroad (I had a good memory for languages—this was true, after a week in China the language was emerging as if from hibernation, each day it grew in strength). He asked if I liked China (sure), and we talked about food, of all things, whether I ate rice at home (yes), whether I preferred rice or noodles or bread (all).