The Middle Kingdom (29 page)

I walked down to the marble pleasure boat the Dowager Empress had bought with the money meant for the Imperial Navy, and as I did I saw the first house I'd bought with Uncle Owen's money.
Which was the more useless purchase?
Zillah said.
Which more cruel?

I couldn't answer her. The Dowager Empress had had an answer for the people who criticized her purchase: she told them she
had
used the money for shipbuilding, and she invited them to visit her boat. I had never asked Walter to visit my first house. He'd come twice, uninvited, only to stand silently in the lacquer-red dining room, and only now did I wonder what he'd thought. Perhaps he'd looked at my careful arrangements of screens, chairs, and porcelains, and had seen, not a woman combining and recombining objects into a pleasing pattern, but a woman getting ready to leave.

In the distance I saw Walter standing near his bench, waving his left arm at me in broad, slow strokes. Years ago, in Fargo, he'd once waved across space like that to me. He and his father had gone for a walk and were returning across the rutted fields; from the window above the kitchen sink I'd seen them emerge from the trees and move our way. The wind caught at their jackets and puffed their sleeves. Walter had turned toward Ray and then Ray had taken a little twisting step and sunk to his knees, as if he wanted to demonstrate to Walter some property of the soil. Walter had turned toward the window where I stood and had thrown his left arm up in the air, moving it slowly back and forth.

I had waved back, and then Walter had cupped his right hand around his mouth and shouted something. I'd thrown open the window. ‘What?' I'd called. I couldn't understand him. ‘What?'

His left arm beat at the air: up, down, up. ‘Geese!' he'd cried. And when I'd raised my eyes to the sky above him, I'd seen an enormous flock of geese in the air, winging their way south.

‘
Geese!
' he'd shouted again.

‘Wonderful!' I'd called back, touched that he'd thought to point them out to me. I'd shut the window and gone to find my mother-in-law, meaning to show her the spectacle, but Lenore was folding sheets in the basement and I got caught up in helping her, left corner brought to right, left brought up again, the two of us moving together for the final folds. By the time we returned to the kitchen, Walter had already led Ray inside. Ray was ashen-faced, leaning on Walter's arm.

‘What
happened?
' I asked.

Walter packed crushed ice in a towel and then wrapped it around Ray's leg. ‘His knee,' Walter said furiously. ‘He twisted his knee out there. Couldn't you hear me calling you?'

I had heard him, but I'd misunderstood him completely; I couldn't be sure what he was saying now. His arm still waved at me, broad and slow and strong. He cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted.

‘Grace!' I heard this time. ‘Come on! We have to get back!' Perfectly clear, as clear as Zillah's voice.

T
HE SKY BEGAN
to darken and the kites a pair of children flew seemed to come alive over Tiananmen Square as the buses drove us in for our final banquet. One, two, three small buses, soft-seated and gray-windowed, nothing like the public bus I'd ridden with Dr Yu. People stared into the windows at us. We were a sight, a spectacle, all of us dressed in our best clothes and giddy because we were going home. I could taste the relief in the air.

‘Two days,' I heard the scientists say again and again. Two days. They were making plans: what they would do, eat, buy first. The Belgians stuck close to the Belgians, the French to the French. The Australians couldn't be separated from each other. Two and a half weeks of traveling, listening to talks, visiting factories and power plants, eating unfamiliar food; all they could think about was home. They poured up the forbidding steps of the Great Hall of the People, chattering in a dozen languages and unaware of the quiet Chinese who climbed slowly beside them.

I walked up the steps alone. Quentin had abandoned me for James Li, which I should have seen coming but hadn't. James had been waiting in the hotel lobby when we returned from the Summer Palace, and as we entered he'd cried ‘Tinnie!' and then thrown himself into Quentin's arms like a long-lost brother, while I stood frozen in surprise.

‘Tinnie?' Walter had said. ‘
Tinnie?
' The name didn't seem to fit the serious scientist beside us.

‘We were college roommates,' Quentin said, and Walter appeared to accept that. I don't believe he saw the gentle touch James gave Quentin, but I did and I felt a moment's panic as Quentin introduced us all around. James shook my hand as if we'd never met before. ‘Mrs Hoffmeier,' he said, rolling the name on his tongue. He gave me a small, conspiratorial smile.

‘That's right,' I said lamely. I'd told him so much, thinking we'd never meet again, and now I worried that he'd tell Quentin, who might tell Katherine, who would surely tell Walter. But James touched my arm lightly before he and Quentin strolled off together, and his touch told me my secrets were safe; he had secrets of his own for me to keep. Katherine stayed behind with me and Walter, and later, as we dressed for the banquet, Walter paused every few minutes to add something to the list growing on a piece of hotel stationery. The list was headed ‘Quabbin Retrospective: A Comparison.' He was gone.

Now they hung behind me two by two, James and Quentin, Katherine and Walter, and all four of them ignored me as I greeted Dr Yu, who was waiting for me on those wide steps. She stood perfectly still, her hands clasped quietly at her waist. She wore the same clothes she'd worn the night we first met: gray skirt, dove-colored silk blouse, black shoes, pearls in her earlobes. The party-goers streamed past her quiet figure.

‘You came,' I said. ‘I'm so glad.'

James and Quentin and Katherine and Walter passed us without a word, completely preoccupied. Dr Yu nodded. ‘Of course I did.' She watched me watching the others, and she said, ‘This is interesting. They have been like this all day?'

‘Pretty much,' I said. Their heads seemed magnetized, locking the couples eye to eye.

‘The new young man – he is overseas Chinese?'

‘Born in New Jersey,' I said. ‘It's a long story.'

‘I imagine,' she said. She followed James Li with her eyes. ‘Look at his clothes – how well he wears them, how nice they are. His shoes, his haircut – all very good. He looks refined. He looks like Zaofan would look, if Zaofan got away.' She paused for a minute and watched as James bent toward Quentin. ‘How is it these two men are so friendly?'

‘They're very old friends,' I said. ‘They went to school together.'

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing more. We passed through the massive doors and into the reception hall, where we stood with several hundred people amidst the huge paintings and the crystal chandeliers and the golden moldings. A small man in a gray suit shepherded us toward another pair of doors at the room's far end. He barked something in a high voice, and then he threw open the doors into the banquet hall. The hall stretched on forever, dotted with round tables covered by crisp white cloths. Rows of white-coated, white-gloved waiters guarded the tables and stood rigid and unsmiling.

The small man came over to Walter as we stepped inside. ‘Dr Hoffmeier?' he said. Walter nodded and the man continued. ‘Please,' he said. ‘You, also other honored guests in your party, please to seat yourselves at one of these six front tables. For distinguished conference members.'

Walter couldn't have been surprised – he'd organized much of the conference, given one of the key lectures, jetted about the country on a speaking tour. But still he flushed pink with pleasure. I sat next to Dr Yu and Quentin sat next to me, and then came James Li and then Walter and then Katherine. The tables sat eight, and I watched the small man puzzle over how to fill our empty seats. As the scientists entered the hall he'd been separating them into two streams, Chinese and foreign, so he could recombine them properly: four or five foreigners at each table, three or four Chinese. An equal balance, very diplomatic, but I could tell he wasn't sure how to count Dr Yu and James Li. Finally he sent over a pair of blue-suited men who introduced themselves as Dr Wu and Dr Shen. They greeted Walter and Katherine and Quentin and me in English, and then they murmured to Dr Yu in their soft Mandarin. When they tried the same on James, James blushed.

‘My apologies,' he said in English. ‘I was born in America, and I speak only English and my parents' dialect. Cantonese. I can't speak the northern tongue.'

The two men looked at each other. ‘Not at
all
?' Dr Shen said. His English was correct but very heavily accented, and I watched as Walter's face closed to him and Katherine's followed.

‘Not at all,' James said. ‘But of course I can read.' As if to prove himself, he plucked the handwritten menu from the lazy Susan and slowly began to translate it for us. ‘Winter melon soup,' he said, struggling over the characters. ‘Crisp skin fish.' No one had the heart to point out the English version written on the back.

Somehow that scene set the tone for the rest of the meal. Every attempt at a general conversation seemed to fail and silences fell after every general observation. We broke into pairs, probably doomed to that from the start by what was going on among half the table. James talked to Quentin in a low voice, describing how strange this visit had been for him. ‘My parents' country,' I could hear him say. ‘But it's not mine at all, although of course it is – but it isn't, really, my parents fled during the revolution …' Walter described Fargo to Katherine, lingering long on his hometown's quiet charms, and Katherine listened happily and agreed with him. ‘I love traveling in the States,' she said. ‘Everything's so wide open, so big – it's the only place to be for a biologist. When I think of what I could do there …' Dr Wu and Dr Shen talked to each other and also to our waiter, who filled our glasses with beer and sweet pink wine and pressed plates of savory appetizers on us. Dr Yu talked to me.

In front of us were several tables of high-ranking Chinese scientists and Party leaders, and Dr Yu pointed some of them out to me. ‘President of Beijing University,' she murmured. ‘President of Qinghua, vice president of Chinese Association for Science and Technology, head of Chinese Academy of Sciences – and there, over there to the left, those are scientists visiting from Shanghai for special study.'

‘It's so amazing,' I said. ‘For me to be here at this …'

One of the scientists proposed a toast, and then another. The waiter refilled our glasses. Dr Yu said, ‘It is amazing for me also, to be here.'

‘Yes?'

‘Very much,' she said. ‘I was here in Beijing when this building was made. In 1959 – everything still seemed so hopeful then. Our fathers both had escaped somehow the Anti-Rightist campaign in '57, even though many scholars were punished then. And so Meng and I were able to go to university, as we wished, and help build socialism. Serve the country. Serve the people. When the huge harvest of '58 came, our classes were canceled and all of us, we went on buses to the countryside to help. We lived in tents. We did not mind the work. We sang, danced, gathered crops. We felt like part of our own country.'

‘That sounds wonderful,' I said, reminded of my early days with Walter. Dr Yu's voice had a wistfulness I could recognize.

‘It was,' she said. ‘It was almost the last time like that we had. The weather changed the next year and then the famine began – you know about this? The three bad years?'

I shook my head, although it didn't sound completely unfamiliar. Her words came to me as if I'd heard them before, vaguely, in a dream.

‘It's not your fault,' she said. ‘Only now do people begin to admit what happened then. Everyone was hungry. Everyone. In the city, here, we received one-half pound of grain each day, no salt, no fat, no meat, no vegetables. We ate bark we scraped from trees and boiled. Also leaves and wild herbs. In the countryside, where two of my brothers were, they ate ground-up cornstalks and sorghum stems and bark and roots.'

She ate steadily as she spoke, her chopsticks moving quickly from the platters to her plate to her mouth. Our waiter brought dish after dish and kept our glasses full, and I concentrated all my attention on Dr Yu's voice. Some of what she was saying sounded familiar to me.

‘You have known famine?' she asked.

‘No,' I said. ‘But sometimes I've eaten to fill up what seems empty, like you'd drink hot water to fill your stomach when you couldn't get anything else. It's just as useless, but that's how I got this big.'

‘I must tell Meng,' Dr Yu said thoughtfully. ‘You have eaten from sadness?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Meng thought you had thyroid disease.'

We both smiled, and Katherine looked up at us before she returned her attention to Walter. Dr Yu pulled the red-cooked chicken over and then she continued talking. ‘Well,' she said. ‘Some people blamed the weather for this famine. Some blamed Mao and the Great Leap Forward. But still we were very idealistic, and we finished our studies and became married and thought, now our lives are really beginning. I was so proud to stay and teach at Qinghua, such a place of prestige. But of course, Qinghua – there was the start, practically, of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. So soon, almost immediately, the president of the university was overthrown, and then all rightist elements and bourgeois academic authorities and also those they call “escaped from the net,” which included me. Immediately my father was attacked because of his foreign training – they said he colluded with reactionaries, secret agents, and cultural imperialists. They said his body was saturated with evil germs of the bourgeoisie, as old meat is with disease.'