The Fortunes (34 page)

And how odd to celebrate July Fourth every year with Chinese-made fireworks with names like Golden Peony and Dragon Tail, Dancing Butterfly and Chrysanthemum Glory, Moon Willow and Blossoming Pearl (not to mention that old knee-slapper, Golden Shower). He used to announce them at Independence Day parties, making up a few along the way: Red-Haired Devil, Great Leap Forward, Laundry Bomb, Flying Lice, Wok-et to the Moon, Panda-moan-ium.

Now he stands at the counter, pointing at his head, crossing his eyes—
Thunder Head,
he thinks,
Temple of Fire
—until the shaggy-haired clerk says, “Ah, Ty-Le-Nol,” as if he's trying to teach John the pronunciation. He takes a box off the shelf, turns it around to show the English on the reverse.

On the way back to the hotel John spots a Starbucks, hurries inside. Or rather a “Starlucks,” he notices as he stands in line, another one to add to the list of copycat names the group has been trading back and forth: Starcups, MukDonald's (complete with a stylized graphic of Donald Trump in a clown suit), and, everyone's favorite, Dulce and Banana. Is it any wonder none of them mentions communism? It's just capitalism misspelled. But the signs, so glancingly familiar yet so deeply off, only add to his disorientation.
It's as if they're all named by my mother,
he has joked, joining in the general hilarity, albeit uneasily. None of the others would be seen dead in these Western knockoffs (even if John's occasionally found himself salivating at the thought of a burger). Such places aren't “real,” the group agrees. Not really American, of course (though there are KFCs on every other corner, real McDonald's side-by-side with the fakes, Western food being as ubiquitous here as Chinese is at home). But also—and this is what they really mean—not Chinese either. Yet what if they're filled, as they are, with real Chinese? What price authenticity, then? And what does that say about where they're taking their new daughters to and from? The girls will grow up Chinese American, John knows, but what will that even mean if China continues to modernize, Westernize? How will it differ, how will it be better, if at all? Still, beyond the group opprobrium, something about these American imitations rankles with him, makes his skin crawl, and he ducks out as soon as he's downed his double espresso (a vast improvement, to be fair, on the three-in-one mix sachets of Nescafé, whitener, and sugar back in the hotel room). His mother reckons China is turning into Singapore:
Singapore on steroids. Never mind the regime, let's shop!
But that too sounds increasingly American to him.

Only . . . this
isn't
the way back to the hotel. A block beyond the coffee shop he slows, pauses, works his way to one edge of the busy sidewalk, out of the flow of the crowd, and stands on tiptoe to see over their heads, looking for something he recognizes. How can it be? he wonders, aghast. He wandered these streets in the darkness and found his way back without difficulty, but now in full daylight he's—he resists the dread word—lost. It must be the crowds, the traffic—a silver pedicab, looking like an armored scooter, bleats at him as it rushes past—but the explanation doesn't tell him which way to go, and he feels a spasm of panic. He's breaking out in prickling pinheads of sweat. He wants to run to the corner, to look up and down streets, but his path, his view, is impeded by bodies in every direction. He thinks of Nola at the hotel, her bad head. How long has he been gone? She'll start to get worried. And the thought of giving her another worry makes him feel sick. When he should be there comforting her. He starts to push against the current of bodies, released by a traffic light; he starts to push and people shout at him. He should excuse himself, but he doesn't have the words, and something, some fear of unmasking, makes him hesitate to speak English. And yet the terror is rising in him now, the sense of entrapment. The Walk signal overhead blinks hyperactively, the little white figure leaning forward, animated legs strobing. Only when he shoves and feels the body before him yield, looks down and finds it's a child he's stumbled into, knocked down, a small girl, now wailing, does he stop, try to lift her to her feet. Now he's holding back the crowd, to shield her, bent down, his haunches burning, getting kneed in the head so that for a moment he fears he'll sprawl underfoot, be trampled. But then he gets his balance, forces himself upright, the child in his arms, and a woman is tugging at his, pulling him aside into a doorway. She takes the child from him, sets her on her feet beside him, thanks him—
xie-xie,
a phrase he has memorized from the guidebook, practiced with drivers and guides and hotel maids—and now he's saying it too—
xie-xie, xie-xie
—which seems to puzzle her, this exhausted-looking mother, and the child is still wailing, and the mother, casually, without even looking down, smacks her around the ear, and she stifles her cries, though John can still feel her trembling sobs where her bony shoulder is pressed up against his waist.

Jesus,
he breathes, and the woman squints at him and says, “Ingrish?” And he nods—“American”—and she beams. “How do meet you please!”

The hotel is only four blocks away. (In his tiredness he must have left the coffee shop by a different door from the one he entered by, gotten turned around, freaked out when the caffeine hit.) The girl runs ahead, her plastic sandals clapping. Outside, he tells the mother her English is very good, and she blushes. (He thinks of his own mother, how even years after living in the U.S. she'd have described the packed street as
chocolate block
with people.) The child swings on the end of her arm, eyes down and almost hidden by the long bangs curtaining her brow. He wishes he had something for her. Money seems wrong, but apart from his bag of Tylenol he's empty-handed. He settles for leading them across the street to Charlie Chin's, letting the girl choose some candy. It feels like an offering.

He's still sweating and shaky when he gets to the room, but Nola only gives him a nod, as if she's barely noticed his absence. When he sits with her on the bed, she puts her head on his shoulder and he presses his lips to her hair, inhales her scent. “Your poor head,” he says, and she says, “My head? Oh, it's fine.” And he understands that she sent him away, must have been as relieved to see him go as he was to leave, but somehow the insight makes him love her more, not less, as if it were some unspoken pact, as if the lie were a gift. A notebook sits on the desk, pencil angled across it. She sees him notice it.

They sit side by side on the edge of the bed, heads touching, arms around each other. He looks at the clock by the bedside. It's still only 1:45. “Are you hungry?” he asks, fearing that she'll send him away again, but she shakes her head gently, rubbing it against his. Two hours to go. Not so long after all this waiting, but it seems an unimaginable, unfillable vastness. She sees him looking at the time and turns her face to his, kisses him.

Thank god,
he wants to tell her,
thank you,
but he knows enough to stay silent as they lie back.

“Better?” she asks later, and he nods.

“I feel less like a horny teenager, at least.”

She smiles and rolls against him, nestling.

All her refusals, her avoidances, all these weeks and months, he concludes, gazing at the ceiling, have made him feel not just unwanted, frustrated, unattractive, but more Chinese. And yet . . . He's knows he's an attentive lover, always aiming to please her first, a point of pride and one reason he's been so resentful of her coolness in bed (though, paradoxically, why he so cherished their sex when they conceived). But now he wonders if he's just diligent, polite, wonders if he'd be the same way with a Chinese woman.

Nola opens her eyes, sensing his body tighten.

“And you?” he asks quickly.

“What?”

“Better?”

She smiles weakly, grips his hand.

“Soon. I hope.”

In the suitcase, between the packs of diapers, the clothes and toys for the baby, and the gifts for Napoleon, the other agency staff, is the thick envelope of cash. They've been told they need to make a donation (John makes air quotes around the word) of $3000 to the orphanage. These envelopes exchanged hands this morning for most couples, but John is taking theirs with them to the orphanage. He thumbs through one of the stacks, rifling the bills, watching Mao flicker past, expecting him to move as if in a flipbook, to wink or stick out his tongue. “Mousy Tongue,” he recalls with a start, a childhood name for the Chairman that made his mother laugh. He tries the bundle in his coat pocket, where it bulges. He's already tried it in his money belt, where it makes him look potbellied. He feels like he needs an attaché case, or a small grip, the kind of bag that cash—ransom money—is exchanged in in the movies. Instead he tucks it into the diaper bag, next to a plush elephant with a stretchy trunk and crinkly ears.

When he brought the wad of bills home from the bank, more cash than he'd ever held in his hands, he joked that they could skip the baby and just pick up some opium—“Or I could just spread it on the bed and we could roll around on it a little.” “I imagine,” Nola had told him, “that that's exactly why the Chinese prefer crisp new bills.”

It's the money that gives the whole thing its air of illicitness, of purchase, even though they're not buying the baby but making a gift for the care of the orphans left behind. He's not sure if that makes it any better. He doesn't like to think of all the thousands of other orphans and what will become of them. And how will Mei feel about them? he asks himself. He imagines these “lucky ones” having a kind of survivor guilt in later life.

The cash certainly makes him feel guilty, and because he feels guilty he expects to be caught, punished, which is probably why he feels such a sense of doom. The cash too makes him fear he's about to get ripped off; it's the same wariness he felt talking with Pearl.

He shakes his head as if to clear it of such doubts. Three thousand, he reminds himself, is also a lucky number, the word for “three” sounding like the character for “birth.”

They take the stubby tour bus to the orphanage, just he, Nola, Napoleon, and their white-gloved driver. It feels strange sitting in the almost empty minibus, hemmed in by traffic, in a country that's so crowded. Napoleon introduced the driver as Ah Ling (an introduction that means he needs to be tipped). Just a coincidence, John knows. Chinese call themselves collectively the
baixing,
“the hundred names”; only a hundred or so surnames cover nearly 90 percent of the entire population, compared to many tens of thousands for the same proportion of Americans. Still, he finds himself studying the driver in the rearview mirror, looking for some resemblance beneath the close-cropped hair and straggly goatee, until the man makes eye contact and John turns away, wary of distracting him as he weaves through traffic, seemingly pumping his horn as often as his brakes or gas. (In Beijing and Xi'an, John had nicknamed their drivers Wie! and Wu! for their slithery, hurtling negotiation of the congestion.
Asian drivers,
he'd whispered to Nola.) Behind them the city recedes, the tops of its skyscrapers lost in the purling smog like mountains in cloud, the sky below bisected by cranes. A pair of them almost touch, a trick of perspective, as if forming an arch—the Gate of Eternal Development. He pictures all the high-rises he's seen in China laid out end to end, guesses they'd stretch as far as the Great Wall.

The orphanage is visible from a distance in the dusk, the bright forms of plastic playground equipment dotting its grounds. Up close, the slides and seesaws are worn and rusted, the plastic bleached and frayed. Big children, six or seven or eight or nine—John finds it hard to guess their age—have commandeered rides that seem too small for them, while littler ones—toddlers? surely they should be asleep—scrape and dig with sticks at the dirt. “They look like they're tunneling their way out,” John jokes, and Nola gives him a look to shut him up.

He pats the money in his bag for reassurance.

Nurses in white coats oversee the children but from the perimeter, giving them the air of scientists observing an experiment. Or haunting ghosts.

Inside, they're greeted effusively by the director, an older woman with tightly permed hair and cat's-eye glasses. Her white coat creaks with starch as she ushers them into her office, offers them tea. They decline; Nola can't bear the delay, he knows. John can see the director is a little put out, but then Mei Mei is brought forth and handed over to Nola. She's tiny, even parceled in blankets, but John is relieved to see she looks healthy. Pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, with no sign of her recent fever. The recuperative power of babies! He touches her tiny fingers, so improbably small and perfect, and she gives him a stern, warning look. He wants to seal the deal, hand over the cash now, before anyone can change their minds—as if he's just stumbled on an incredible bargain—but something, some residual fear of being taken, some sense that it's the most cash he's ever held in his hands, or perhaps some intuition of something in the orphanage director's manner, so eagerly polite, makes him pause. He looks at the baby again; he pushes back the downy bangs at her temples. He looks at Nola and he knows she knows too. There's a drowning look in her eyes, and he wants to protect her so much that he misreads it.

She wants him to shut up, he realizes a moment after he says, “But this isn't Mei Mei. This isn't the girl in the photograph.” He pulls it out to make sure, stuffs the envelope of cash back in the same pocket. There's a birthmark, a small mole on her temple. A beauty spot, they'd called it to each other. He peers hard at the photo, trying to determine if it's a blemish, but then all at once everything else is wrong—the set of the mouth, the nose. They're already trying to tell him—the director, even Napoleon—that the photo is old, that babies change, but he can see that putting the envelope of money back in his pocket has given him the upper hand here. “It's not, is it?” He looks at Nola and she nods infinitesimally.