Across a Green Ocean. Wendy Lee
like that, wouldn’t you? So that I’d be completely dependent on you for everything?”
David paused. “I wasn’t aware you depended on me for anything.”
“Well, I don’t want anything from you,” Michael told him. “Not your charity, and not your money, and definitely not your key.”
It was almost as if he were watching himself get up, walk past David and his still-outstretched hand, and out the door. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he took the stairs, and each step jolted him back into his own body, so that by the time he got to the lobby, he was aware of how theatrical he was being. He walked past the doorman, who always seemed to have a smirk in the corner of his mouth when he saw Michael and David together, and managed to exit the building before his cell phone rang for the first time.
Outside, people spilled out from the bar and onto the sidewalk, young men with their collars unbuttoned, young women barely able to stand erect after a day in heels. Still, no one wanted to go home, because that would mean being alone. Looking at these beautiful young people, Michael felt a sense of relief—comfort, even—in the knowledge that life was proceeding as it should; unattached, free.
There were three messages from David on his phone by the time Michael got back home, as well as a hang up from his mother. Briefly, he wondered what she wanted to talk to him about, but concluded that whatever it was, it couldn’t be that serious. He hadn’t spoken to his mother since he had lost his job a month earlier, afraid that she’d ask questions, offer to send him money, or even worse, suggest that he move home. Plus, he didn’t want to have to relive that morning when his boss called him into his office to tell him that he’d been laid off. Although he’d been expecting it for weeks, and never cared very much for his work or the people he worked with, he had still felt an inexplicable void. Now he understood why people called both losing a job and a death in the family life-altering events. Maybe the trip he was about to take would be life altering as well.
So, ignoring the calls from both David and his mother, Michael put some things in a backpack. There wasn’t much—some clothes and toiletries, and, of course, Liao Weishu’s letter and its translation. He had an early morning flight to Beijing to catch. In a fit of conscience, he wrote a hasty note and left it on the table. He figured that after not hearing from him for a while, David would come over and use his key to get into his apartment, and he didn’t want David to think the worst about him. Michael was already doing a good job of that himself.
The train finally pulls into the station in Xining, Qinghai Province, the morning of Michael’s third day in China, to the strain of schmaltzy elevator music that comes on overhead at every stop. Michael slings his backpack over his shoulder and disembarks, whereupon he is beset by a dozen or so hotel touts, shouting things at him in Chinese. When that doesn’t work, they switch to Japanese.
“Hotel?” Michael says in English.
“Hotel!” one of the men replies, and Michael goes with him.
He gets into a red taxi while the driver continues to chatter at him in English, some of which makes sense. Michael gathers that the man is telling him about the tourist attractions in the city and its environs, including something that sounds like a big lake. At least he remembers seeing a lake on one of the travel websites, which advised him that it isn’t worth visiting.
The taxi stops in front of what must be the grandest hotel in town, a concrete square with an automatic glass door. Behind the front desk is a row of clocks and their corresponding times in international cities, in an imitation of a more cosmopolitan place, except Losangeles and Saopaulo are single words. The clerk stammers when Michael speaks to him in English. Michael obtains a hotel room for the equivalent of twenty US dollars. He paid the taxi driver two dollars.
“Should I put my passport in your safe?” he asks the hotel clerk, remembering something he read on a travel website.
“No need,” the clerk says. “No minorities here.”
“Excuse me?” Michael wonders if he has heard correctly, or if something has been missed in the translation.
“No Uighur people here.”
Michael has no idea what kind of people that means, but goes along with it.
His room is decent enough, with a Western-style toilet and a washcloth the size and texture of a paper towel. Michael lies down on the scratchy orange coverlet on the bed. It’s marginally softer than the hard seat of the train, but, for the first time since he’s left Beijing, he is totally, blessedly, alone. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, several hours have passed and it is already afternoon.
Downstairs, he finds the clerk who speaks English and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to the normal university?”
If the clerk is surprised that Michael wants to go there rather than one of the usual tourist attractions, he doesn’t show it. He marks the location on a map, and since it looks like a straight shot north, Michael decides to walk there and see if his first impression of the city will be changed any. It isn’t. The heat has dissipated somewhat, but there is still a haze over everything. Even the leaves on the trees appear to be covered with a light film of dust. Rising in the background, barely visible through the pollution, are the outlines of mountains.
He walks by buildings that look like they have been recently constructed, or at least in the last fifty years: gray Soviet-style apartment blocks, stores fronted by blue glass, buildings covered in white tile, as if the entire outdoors were a bathroom. At the same time, amid the trucks and motorcycles, donkeys pull carts down the street. Michael spies a group of men waiting at a bus stop, looking unlike anyone he’s seen in China until now. They’re wearing robes peeled down over their torsos, with the sleeves tied around their waists, their faces flat and chiseled, the color of beef jerky. He realizes they must be Tibetans. He’s definitely not in the China he’d imagined, a land of rice paddies, where everyone is either a farmer or a Communist cadre, or both.
As the sun appears to be poised directly overhead, Michael realizes he hasn’t eaten that day. Not wanting to stop, and not feeling confident enough to enter one of the stores, he buys an ice cream bar from a cart. The shrewd vendor gives him one look and charges him as much as his taxi ride, but Michael doesn’t have the language or the inclination to argue. He figures that two dollars are what he’d pay for a bad ice cream back in the States. Then he looks around and realizes something else that has given him away as a foreigner: The only people eating ice cream at this time of day are children. They are also, he thinks, looking down at his own bare legs, the only ones who are wearing shorts. Being in China so far has made him feel like a large baby, unable to express himself, eating the wrong foods, wearing inappropriate clothes.
Uncannily, Michael feels someone staring at him. Standing in front of him is a dirty-faced, bare-footed child, tattered clothes hanging off a skinny frame that indicates he’s probably older than he looks. The child points at the ice cream and then at his mouth. Michael isn’t used to beggars like this—panhandlers on New York streets, sure, but there is something about this boy that strikes him as more depressing. He hesitates, but then decides this isn’t his country, or his problem. He shakes his head and turns his attention back to his ice cream, but before he can take a bite, the child shoots out a hand and plunges two grimy fingers into the ice cream bar so that it crumples into a sticky mess before he runs away.
Michael stares at the smashed ice cream, not quite sure what has just happened. Did that kid decide that if Michael wasn’t going to give him his ice cream, then no one was going to have it? Was he even capable of such a devious thought? Shaking his head in disgust, though he isn’t sure whether it is at himself or the child, Michael throws the dirty ice cream into the gutter. He isn’t sure what kind of welcome this is, but he forces himself to move past it.
Thankfully, the farther he progresses down the street, the more pleasant it becomes, bordered by trees that are still spindly and stunted and dusty, but there are more of them, so they create some shade. Finally, on his right, are two open gates, signaling an institution of some kind. Just beyond, surrounded by a scraggly flower bed, is a statue of Mao with his right hand