The Middle Kingdom. Andrea Barrett
dress. Something I never would have worn in the days before Walter, when my taste had run to black jeans and my brother’s torn shirts.
‘We should get some food,’ Dr Yu said. She’d apparently decided to adopt me for the evening. ‘Maybe you would introduce me to your husband?’
I nodded and followed her, steering my way around the Chinese string quartet who were clustered at the microphone and mangling some Mozart. Walter nodded coolly to me and then turned away. Dr Yu said, ‘Here, try some of this. And this, this is good, and this, and oh, you must have some of this, and this is delicacy, sea-cucumber, you have had?’
My stomach rumbled and Dr Yu smiled. What she heaped on my plate could have fed six people if those people hadn’t been me. Pork skin roasted in sugar and soy, chicken in white pepper and ginger, puffballs with bok choy, shrimp dumplings, deep-fried grass carp boned and cut to resemble chrysanthemums, marinated gizzards sliced fine, sea-cucumber with vegetables, roast duck. ‘This is good,’ Dr Yu said of each dish. Although she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, half of me, she heaped her own plate too and then turned to look wistfully at Walter as we left the table.
With a full mouth and waving chopsticks, Walter was holding court.
‘Maybe I could introduce you later,’ I said, following her eyes. ‘When he’s not so busy?’
‘Later,’ Dr Yu agreed. ‘You wish to sit with him?’
‘Are you kidding?’ I said, and then we had to pick that phrase apart. She made me feel useful, in an odd way – every bit of idiomatic speech I offered delighted her. She asked more questions and I explained what I could, until the music silenced us both. The string quartet played more Mozart, a girl sang some Mendelssohn, a man in a tuxedo sang arias from a revolutionary opera.
While the musicians performed, I watched Walter and considered how I’d ended up with him. I could hardly remember – something was thumping at me just then, something that made me want to plant a bomb in the midst of that civilized scene. I wanted to tip the tables over, light a bonfire in the corner, burst out of the room and into the life that was streaming through the streets outside. I wanted to dance on the tables, screaming my lungs out all the while. Instead, I applauded loudly whenever Dr Yu did. Her plate was already empty, I noticed. I hadn’t seen her take a bite.
Smiling, she picked up a conversational thread I thought we’d snapped, and she said, ‘So, why have you no children? Who will carry on your name?’
I shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’ The burr-voiced woman appeared at the microphone again, laughing this time. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘now, we have sung and made music for our var-ry distinguished for-eign friends. Now, we ask they sing for us! Everyone, sing your own country’s songs!’
The Chinese clapped; the rest of us laughed until we realized she was serious. Finally two good-natured Americans, surely small-town boys, made their way to the front of the room and sang a bawdy Irish tune off-key. Walter frowned, offended. Dr Yu said, ‘This is a typical American song?’
‘No,’ I told her, laughing. ‘It’s a very bad song.’
Dr Yu agreed. A troll-like man got up to sing a Hungarian song I almost recognized, and a Swede sang a song I was sure Mumu had once sung to me. Everyone danced and the tuxedoed man sang a Viennese waltz that sent people whirling around the room. A band – electric piano, two guitars, violin, drum – assembled near the microphone and tried with mixed success to accompany the singers. A Japanese limnologist sang a festival song that seemed to have something to do with a shovel. Three German algologists sang a lullaby; two Israeli invertebrate zoologists sang a folk song. More beer, more sweet pink wine. My dress was sticking to me and my armpits were damp. Dr Yu, who seemed to think we knew each other much better than we did, said, ‘You tell me if I am impolite to ask – how did you meet your husband?’
No point in going into that – I couldn’t explain it even to myself. I gave her the simple answer, meaning to be polite. ‘I was his student,’ I said, remembering how he used to read to me for hours, so caught up in his work that he’d hardly pause to catch his breath.
‘Ah,’ Dr Yu said with a smile. ‘Very good student?’
‘Very good,’ I agreed. ‘Too good. Brownnose.’
‘Brown-nose? What does that mean?’
‘Someone who is too nice to teacher, tries too hard, always sucking up …’
‘Suck-up?’
‘Never mind that one. Maybe you work with someone like this, someone who’s always trying to be the boss’s favorite – we call them “brownnose” from, you know – his face stuck to the boss’s … behind? Rear end?’
Dr Yu smiled, took a pen from her pocket, and quickly sketched two Chinese characters on her palm. She flashed them at me, rubbed them out quickly, and said, ‘We have a word, which translates in English as “ass-face” – is that close?’
‘Very.’
‘But you are not an ass-face.’
‘Sometimes I am,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I’ve been an enormous ass-face. You wouldn’t believe.’
Behind me, two Chinese scientists seemed to be discussing my new friend. I heard the word yu again and again, and I interrupted Dr Yu’s protestations to ask her what they were talking about.
‘Same old thing,’ she said wryly. ‘Work. All so very ambitious here. This is the new way, new reward-for-responsibility system made by Old Deng – you know?’
‘I thought I heard your name.’
Dr Yu laughed. ‘They are talking about what your husband does. They say yú with a rising tone – means fish, and yú with a falling-rising tone – means rain.’ She wrote the words on her palm in pinyin and added their tone marks. ‘Say after me,’ she commanded.
I did, amazed at her singing language. Until she coached me, all my tones had sounded exactly the same. Fish, rain, the effects of rain on fish, a rain of fish, a fishy rain – in my mouth there had been no difference. Dr Yu kept drilling me, passing the syllables back and forth, and I didn’t care that people stared at us. I was slowly beginning to get the idea and as I did I began to understand the men behind us, as if static had suddenly cleared from my ears.
There were four tones, said the books I had studied. Flat, rising, falling-rising, falling – four. The books had been clear. But without someone to talk with, the tones had never made it from the page to my ears. ‘Yú,’ said one of the men behind me, perfectly clearly. Rain. At the reservoir, Walter and I had worked even when it rained, even when the sky was so cold, so gray, so bleak, that there seemed to be no boundary between the lake and the air, between night and day, between work and the rest of life.
As if we had conjured it up, rain began to fall outside. Dr Yu fetched some more beer and then, while people around us danced and sang and told each other stories, we began trading words in earnest, correcting each other’s pronunciation, building sentences, muttering tones. I drew words on my palm, matching the characters she drew on hers and warming, finally, to her charm and persistence. She told me how she’d been sent off to raise pigs in Shanxi province during the Cultural Revolution – ‘the blood years,’ she said – and I told her how Mumu, my fat Swedish grandmother from whom I’d inherited my weight and my hair, had taught me to catch shad and bake them for hours until the bones dissolved. How I’d loved to fish but had never meant to study the creatures until Walter came along.
‘What is he like?’ Dr Yu said. ‘I mean, in his privacy?’
What was the harm in telling her? I thought about the way he wouldn’t eat unless the food sat correctly on his plate – peas here, potatoes there; no drips, no drops, no smears. How he couldn’t sleep without the top sheet tucked in all around him; how he liked his women as neat as his mother. Smooth, groomed, no visible pores or swellings, no fat – my God,