The Middle Kingdom. Andrea Barrett
Zaofan had sent me a stilted, formal letter after he’d gotten the first one, congratulating me on Jody’s birth. I’d sent another back, thanking him and avoiding any explanation of Jody’s physical appearance. ‘I’ve given Jody my maiden name,’ I’d written. ‘Doerring – Jody Doerring. My father is pleased.’ And if Zaofan knew more about Jody’s paternity than that, he never pressed it. Since then, we’d kept up an occasional correspondence in which I described how Jody was growing and Zaofan described his adjustments to life in Massachusetts.
‘Think of Jody,’ Xiaomin said. ‘What if something happens to him?’
‘No,’ I said again.
‘You’ll hurt us if you stay,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll make things worse for us – I can’t afford to have an American working in my lab. And you can’t refuse me, not after all that Meng and I have done for you.’
And that was the one argument I couldn’t refute. She and Meng had done everything for me: arranged for me to stay in China, found me work in Xiaomin’s lab, stood by me throughout my pregnancy and during my labor and then helped me through the awkwardness of registering Jody’s birth when I had no husband. They’d helped me buy a bike. They’d taught me to find my way around the city. And, whether they’d meant to or not, they’d helped me discover how I fit into the world.
‘I owe you,’ I told her. ‘I know I do. But don’t make me repay you like this.’
‘I can’t let you keep Jody here,’ she said. ‘He’s all we have.’
And so there we were. She sat down on the grass beside Jody and pulled me down beside her, and then she traced an imaginary map on the grass with her finger and explained how I should slip through the alleys to the back side of the diplomatic compound and the door to the American embassy. ‘Turn here,’ she said. ‘And then here.’ She couldn’t look at my face.
‘How can I go?’ I said. Somewhere, I knew, Jianming was on a train or a truck, heading for Changsha. Wenwen was searching the city for her brother; parents were searching the morgues for the bodies of their children. People hid in their rooms and prepared to pull into themselves again, shuttering their eyes, closing down their faces. Chinese students working abroad faxed photographs and articles across the air to machines here, any machines, hoping someone might pick up the messages. In Shanghai, a bus was on fire. In secret buildings in the Western Hills, the old men who ruled China huddled together, massaging their legs and avoiding each other’s eyes as they drafted statements couched in a rhetoric they’d worn out decades earlier.
‘Wenwen and the others,’ I said to Xiaomin. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But the old men can’t last much longer, and the rest of us will still be here after they’re gone. You have your passport? And Jody’s?’
‘They’re in my pocket,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think I should leave them in my room.’
‘That’s all you need. I’ll send you the rest later.’
I was going, then. To the embassy, to rooms full of people I didn’t know and had avoided during my stay; to a bus full of terrified tourists eager to flee this alien place. To a plane, to Hong Kong or Tokyo, across the ocean: home. What had once been home. For a minute I thought of Zillah, my first, lost friend, and I wondered if I was repeating what I’d done with her. But then I heard Zillah’s voice, as clearly as if she stood there on the steps.
Don’t confuse the situations, she said.
‘Juice?’ Jody said, looking at me expectantly. It was time for his snack and his nap.
‘Let me say good-bye to Meng,’ I said to Xiaomin.
She shook her head. ‘He’s operating,’ she said. ‘You can’t go in. He’ll understand.’
When I rose she put Jody’s pack over my shoulders and then picked him up and dropped him in. ‘You have a good trip,’ she said to him. ‘Remember your Minmin.’
‘See you later,’ Jody said. ‘Alligator.’
Xiaomin had been in my room when I’d taught Jody that phrase; she loved to hear it and Jody loved to say it, because it always made her smile. She smiled now, and then she said to me, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.’
I knew she was right: that for the rest of my life, she’d be with me wherever I went. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, and then we both ran out of words. As I wheeled my bike away from the steps, I turned and saw her watching, the breeze blowing her graying hair away from her face.
SEPTEMBER 1986
PATIENT: Doctor, I’ve come to you because I think I have a strange disease.
DOCTOR: What is it?
PATIENT: I have been afraid of noise and strong light for two years. When I’m exposed to these, I feel tense and restless.
DOCTOR: Do you have other symptoms?
PATIENT: Yes. At times I suffer from palpitations and shortness of breath. I sleep poorly and am troubled almost nightly by frightening dreams.
DOCTOR: What sort of dreams do you have?
PATIENT: They are different. For instance, once I dreamed that I fell down from a precipice. On another occasion I was chased by a wolf, and in other dreams I have lost my way in a desert.
—adapted from A Dialogue in the Hospitals
We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results.
—Mao
WHEN I WAS nine I had scarlatina, which was something like being boiled alive. A huge burning fever. Scalded skin. And a delirium so deep that, always after that, I believed in the possibility of another world.
My mother packed me in ice every few hours to knock my fever down, and afterward she never tired of recounting her trials. In a room full of friends and relatives she would draw me to her, stroke my head, and describe my rigid and trembling form, my burned lips and my rolled-back eyes. She’d tell how she had labored over me then, cooling, stroking, soothing; for years she drew on that capital, reproaching me each time I failed her with tales of her sleepless nights.
Maybe she stayed awake all those nights. Maybe she kept me alive. That doesn’t sound like her, but maybe it’s true – all I know of those lost days is what she told me. All that remains of my own from then is a memory of the voice that came to visit my head.
Eat your peas, the voice said at first. My mother, inside my skull.
Don’t put your elbows on the table.
Sit up straight. Hold your stomach in. Don’t bite your fingernails.
I had caught the fever from a girl named Zillah, who lived in the projects by the riverside and who had the habit of making whole worlds out of pebbles and feathers and pinecones and rice. She laid these out on the sand at the base of the gravel pit, where we were strictly forbidden to play, and once she’d finished we peopled the streets and spaces with the beings we saw in our heads. Stones that grew out of the earth like trees. Trees that sang like birds. Stars that wept and talking dogs and wheat that acted with one mind, moving like an army. I was forbidden