by Samuel Shem
Wanting to remove himself from this scene, Pep looks away.
As he stares at the entrance to the courtyard, he sees a woman walk in from around the corner and come toward them. She is tall and slender—“willowy” is the word that comes to mind—and young, maybe in her thirties. Unlike many of the women they’ve seen in Changsha, she wears a white silk dress slit up the side and covered with pink lotus blossoms, the silk flowing down to just above her ankles, revealing tan feet in blood-red sandals. A matching red parasol protects her from the heat. As she gets closer, his breath catches in his chest—she is beautiful. Beautiful and sensual. A long oval face with high cheekbones and large, dark eyes and shoulder-length black hair—which, in the bright sun, glints with an almost imaginary touch of red—like Katie’s. Thin and graceful like Katie, too. And unlike most of the Chinese women he’s seen, she looks straight into his eyes and holds his gaze. Her smile seems to him, somehow, not casual, but deep, even elegant—also unusual, here in rural China. He smiles back. She turns and walks across the yard and goes up onto the veranda and into an office of the police station. He can still see her standing in line, waiting her turn.
“Pep,” Clio whispers to him, clutching his arm, “did you see that woman?”
“Beautiful—incredibly beautiful.”
“No, no—I mean she looks just like Katie.”
“Yeah, I thought that too—”
“Just like! Of all the thousands of Chinese faces we’ve seen, she’s the only one who looks just like Katie.”
“Yes, she does, but—”
“The same face, eyes, hair—the same build?”
They stare at her, standing in line in the doorway.
“What’s up, doc?” says Rhett, badly mimicking a Bugs Bunny accent. He too is staring at the woman in the doorway. Clearly he has overheard their conversation.
Clio feels a tug on her sleeve, and reflexively pulls away.
The beggar woman is standing up, pulling at her insistently, roughly. Rhett speaks harshly to her, but she doesn’t let go. He tries to pry her fingers off Clio’s sleeve. It takes him a while to do so, and meanwhile the twine has come loose from her wrist and the little boy is wandering across the courtyard, straight into the traffic of bicycles and motorbikes and cars.
“Rhett! Pep!” Clio cries out, afraid for the child. “Hold her—I’ll get him.”
She rushes off toward the boy, who is disappearing down into another doorway in the rabbit warren of the police station.
Rhett takes hold of the woman, but she struggles free. Pep, repelled by the smell and dirt, helps Rhett walk the woman back to the wall. Wailing, gesturing toward them for money and then to where the boy has disappeared, she squats down again. Pep looks over to Clio, who has the boy by the hand. The child is resisting her grip, but feebly.
Pep turns away again, and sees the woman in the white silk dress and red sandals come back out of the doorway. She glances at him once more and smiles, then puts up her red parasol against the sun and turns and walks away, disappearing again around the concrete gateway into the alley.
He thinks to tell Clio, but she is in the far corner of the courtyard, trying to get the boy to move. About fifteen Chinese men and women have gathered around them and are talking loudly. Rhett and Pep leave the old woman and help Clio bring the boy back. Rhett shoos away the Chinese, and ties the twine around the old woman’s wrist.
“Pep, let’s give her something.”
“Fine,” he says, taking out a five-yuan bill—nothing for them, a lot for the beggar. Clio puts it in the boy’s hand. The boy immediately gives it to the old woman, who smiles her black smile and bows her head up and down in thanks, and reaches out to try to grasp Clio’s hand. Clio smiles and nods at her, but backs away.
They walk to the bus. Clio looks in. Katie is still asleep on the seat. “Thank God Katie didn’t see that!”
“No fooling,” Pep says, taking out his packet of sterile Handi Wipes. “But you did good. Want one?”
She wipes her hands, looking toward the alcove where they saw the woman with Katie’s face.
“She left,” Pep says.
“What?”
“I saw her walk out.”
“And you didn’t tell me? I wanted to, you know, well, talk to her.”
“Why?”
“Because she...” She stops herself. “Hurry, come on, get in the bus.” She pushes Pep and Rhett inside. “Rhett, tell the driver to try to find her. Go back down that road. Shit! Hurry up!”
Rhett blinks, and stares at her for a long moment, as if calculating something mysterious or, Pep thinks, profitable. “Sure. No problem. Let’s go. Saddle up!”
With what seems to Clio like excruciating slowness, the driver backs up, out, and into the narrow alley they came in on. The woman is gone.
“Go to the end,” Clio says, “try the other roads. Pep, you look out that side, I’ll do this—Rhett, please—faster?”
“Okay, okay.” He leans over the driver’s shoulder and whips him on with a few harsh exhortations. The bus jumps, reaches the end of the alley, turns onto a larger road. Nothing. They drive up and down, staring into every doorway and alley. Nothing.
The bus bangs through the fractious traffic. They drive here and there, up and down the nearby streets where she might have walked. No luck.
“Who are you looking for?” Katie asks, sleepily.
Back at the hotel there is a new banner in the lobby:
WELCOME TO SEE YOU AGAIN
They hire Rhett for some sightseeing the next afternoon.
Up in their room, Katie grabs her bathing suit and bolts for the pool. They try to keep up, calling out to her to wait in the lobby. Her long legs seem to glide down the grand marble staircase. She has always been athletic, like Clio. When they go for runs together Katie seems to float, as if she’s imitating one of her beloved animals, a fawn, or a foal.
Soon they are sitting beside the pool, watching her play in the water.
“Clio, listen,” Pep says. He feels the chilly fizz of his first Tsingtao since lunch flow down into his body. “It’s impossible.”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, of course. Impossible.”
6
That evening they decide on nostalgia—a birthday bash for Katie at the Jiangjiang Hotel, where they stayed when they came to Changsha to adopt her. Rhett has gone for the day, but the Grand Sun concierge arranges for a taxi to take them, wait, and bring them back—writing the instructions in Chinese on a hotel card. As they drive across Changsha in a taxi, they recognize almost nothing of the city. In a decade it has grown from three million to six. It used to be a quaint jumble of small streets and two-lane roads lined with one-story shacks where people sold their wares; now the roads have been widened, the small buildings destroyed. Blunt new skyscrapers are everywhere.
Chinese Culture Camp has taken them through one dirty, noisy, polluted city of five million after another, seeking out tourist sites among the ratcheted construction and rising nondescript buildings. Changsha—like many of the other cities—could almost be Anywhere, USA, say, Atlanta. The China that they fell in love with ten years before has mostly vanished. Changsha traffic is fierce; driving, perilous. Before, there were few cars and a million bikes; now it seems the reverse. The roads are jammed. There used to be only a few traffic lights, now there are many—mostly ignored. Instead of Mao hanging from the taxi’s rearview mirror for good luck, it’s Michael Jordan. Their taxi driver acts like a kid with a new toy. The ride is heart-stopping. Pep and Clio white-knuckle their seats. After a few close calls, even Katie curls down in the backseat covering her eyes. Whenever Clio sees a young woman in a long white dress she scans her face, looking for her.
The Jiangjiang Hotel has survived. Pep gets out of the cab and reenacts with Katie what he said to her the first time, bringing her back from the orphanage:
Ten years ago, it was the best hotel in Changsha. Now it is shabby. In the lobby are several elegantly dressed “ladies of the night”—Clio can’t help but scan their faces too. In one of the private function rooms, there is karaoke—a man in a cheap suit up in front of his fellow workers, mike in hand, singing along with a woman in a bikini on TV. But the shabbiness makes it seem quaint, campy, even funky. Pep has difficulty explaining to the manager that they need his help in finding the room on the ninth floor where they lived during their first week with their baby. Like most Chinese who know English, he speaks a stiff, formal, textbook style. Even in five-star hotels, the translations of signs are literal, and often comical. Yesterday when they checked into the Grand Sun they laughed out loud at the sign over the courtesy phone in the lobby: “TOURISTS COMPLAINING PHONE.” Two days ago, south of Chengdu, at the colossal Grand Buddha of Leshan, the brochure started out okay—“At 71 meters he is the biggest ancient stone carved figure of Buddha in the world”—but then floated out into a religious/historical morass—“He was originated and built for reducing flood and serving for mass by monk Hai Tong rabbi in Tang dynasty.”
Finally the manager understands, and accompanies them to floor nine. The wide, red-carpeted, dim hallway still has the same smell—pungent, earthy, mushroomy—with a hint of antiseptic. Four girls in scarlet uniforms are still there to attend to the wishes of the ninth-floor guests, though the rack of Communist propaganda is gone. Pep and Clio remember that the room is on the right side near the end of the hallway, facing the street where, every morning, a street cleaner truck playing a calliope tune awoke them, but they aren’t sure which room it is. They choose 921.
It is much smaller than they recall, like returning to your hometown as a grown-up. Someone is occupying the room, but they aren’t there. A mahjong game lies orphaned on a low table. But it is much the same as it was—two single beds, a tiny refrigerator, large chrome thermoses of boiled water. They go into the small bathroom.
“We gave you your first bath here,” Clio says, “right there in the sink. It was the first time you made a sound—you wailed! In the orphanage, you never made a single sound.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t know—you were all bundled up, and peaceful. It’s a mystery.”
Katie wonders at that, that she didn’t make a sound. Why not? Was I scared? Weird not to know why. She looks at her mom, who is inspecting the bathroom as if it has some secret passage in it. A mystery? Like when Tara and Kissy were asking each other, “What time were you born?” And they each said what time they were born and then they asked me and I said the truth, “I don’t know,” and they gave me a weird look and I had to say something else so I said, “I’m a child of mystery,” and I felt outsidered.
“You were so stuffed up,” Pep is saying, “you couldn’t sleep. So we all got naked and turned on the hot water and stayed in here till the steam cleared you out.”
“I fit in that sink? It’s weird not to remember—I mean except what you told me.”
“We tried everything to get you to sleep,” Clio says, “and nothing worked, and finally we looked over—we didn’t have a crib, they just gave us a baby carriage, one of those massive old-fashioned ones with big wheels?—and we saw, up over the side, you had one hand held up straight in the air, and you were asleep.”
“Like I was saluting or something?”
“Or maybe surrendering,” Pep says.
“Yeah, I remember—I mean you told me. Maybe I was trying to get out of the baby carriage and sleep with you guys? You told me there were two babies in every crib in the orphanage, so maybe I was scared being alone?”
“Think so?” Clio asks.
“I’m really hungry. Can we like eat?”
Pep and Clio look at each other and smile. To her, and now to them too, it’s just a room. Worse, someone else’s room. They leave easily, not wanting any more of the other room, the magical room, to disappear. The restaurant they remembered is still there, but the cuisine has gone downhill. Picking at the chicken with vegetables, Katie happens upon a head—complete with beak. In disgust she pronounces the food the worst on the trip—a lot worse than the food back home in Columbia at Chinese Restaurant or even at the new one, Shalom Hunan.
Outside on the street, they are accosted by several beggars. One, a shriveled old man with a cane, blocks their way and pecks at Katie with his free hand, screeching at her as if she understands. Two weeks of beggars in the new China have put Pep on edge—you never saw a beggar in China ten years ago, it was safer than America. He puts one arm around Katie, the other around Clio, and starts for the cab, parked up the street.
The old man suddenly sidesteps, blocking their way. Another beggar approaches. Pep starts to get anxious. Thinking quickly, he points to a spot behind the old man, and as the man turns to look, Pep leads Katie and Clio quickly to safety.
They get into the cab, and rocket on off, away.
Katie is embarrassed. Did he have to trick him like that?
Clio and Katie clutch each other as the cab careens along in crazy lane changes and close calls.
Across the street from the slick and sparkly thirty-story Grand Sun Hotel, there is a new banner:
HELP TURN CHANGSHA INTO CLEAN MODERN CIVILIZED CITY.
7
An hour later, they are lying in their terrific beds. The air-conditioning hums softly. Katie is in bed with Clio, Pep in the next bed by himself—the usual arrangement on the trip. Katie finishes a chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Pep turns out the lights. Clio rubs Katie’s back and waits to see if she’ll start to talk. In the dark at the end of the day, Katie often gets chatty. But not tonight.
Clio has been disappointed by how little time she’s had alone with Katie. Katie’s friend Heather Ho McGinnity from New York City came along on the first part of the trip, and the two of them were inseparable. Sitting together on the bus, running around the tourist sites, sitting together at restaurants and every night watching TV in the hotel—it’s been a glorious two-week playdate. For the whole past year, Clio has felt Katie spiraling out, less and less interested in spending time with her, preferring to be with her friends—or Mary. Sleepovers are all the rage. Spook Rock Country Day School is a hidden world, a kind of British-Visigothic fortress from which parents are mostly forbidden—except from the first-rate Development Office. The teachers are fuzzy but not warm. At home Katie has killer homework, and then dives into her computer, or the TV—and we let her.
The tight, close “I can tell you anything” bond that they shared for years has frayed. They used to talk about everything—everything! Katie would open up completely, and with the most heart-wrenching innocence, as if it were natural not to have any separation between them. Clio had never had conversations like that with anyone before. And now, is it ending? What if she and I can never talk that way again?
Clio had hoped that the trip would break the pattern, that it would be a chance for her to spend time with Katie—it’s been anything but. Even when Clio’s been alone with Pep, her mind has been on her daughter—she knows he senses her divided attention. She hopes that these few days alone with Katie and Pep in Changsha will be a real chance for all of them.
“I’m sorry, Katie,” she says now. “It wasn’t the greatest birthday in the world. We’ll do better tomorrow. After the orphanage, you get to do anything you want.”
“Okay, Mom. Thanks.” She pauses. “You know, coming here to China, I thought it would be like a quest, like the Greeks this year in school, like Ulysses on his adventures, or in our class play when Orpheus goes like looking for Eurydice down in Hades? Where the hero goes on a journey and discovers things? I mean discovers what’s really happening, not what he thinks is happening or wants to happen or whatever? So I’ve been trying to act like that, trying to kinda jo
urney-like and discover what’s really happening, I mean as much as I can?”
“Good, honey. Daddy and I feel that way about this trip too.”
“Thanks. But the bad news is, is that... well, coming here to China and seeing everything like the people and how different they look and how poor they are and all?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Mom, I can’t believe I came from here, from China. Like I’m Chinese, but I’m really more Chinese American? Like I’m Chinese, but not Chinese? People look at us and they’re wondering why these two Americans are with this Chinese girl? At the police station, it was like the policemen were thinking you kidnapped me or something! It’s all pretty weird. So all the time I feel weird here, people coming up to me talking to me and expecting me to speak Chinese? Before I got here I thought Chinese was like in the back of my brain and it would just come out when I’m here but it hasn’t?”
“It’s hard, honey,” Clio says. “But I know exactly what you mean. We’re all feeling that, aren’t we, Dad? Strange, and trying to put it all together to make sense?”
“We sure are,” Pep says.
“We’re glad that you’re really trying to understand it.”
