At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  Clio stares at this woman, the first blood relative of her baby—seeing even more of Katie in her now—and feels a sob rise in her throat, but quickly clicks back into control. Her arm is around Katie’s shoulder, protectively.

  Pep, despite another hard shock of claustrophobia that makes him duck his head as if he’s in a tight tunnel, is stunned again at the woman’s beauty. He watches her rise as they enter, and smooth her silk dress down along her waist, accentuating the lines and lace of her bra. Willowy. Sensual. And yes, she does look like an older Katie, remarkably so.

  Katie glances up at the woman, their eyes meet. Katie shies away. Nah, she doesn’t look that much like me really. And she’s really my birth mom’s sister, my aunt?

  Rhett introduces them all, pointing to each in turn as if identifying dishes at a banquet table: “Ming Tao, Clio, Pep, and Katie. Katie—this is your aunt, Tao Ayi.”

  Clio watches as Ming Tao stares at Katie for a long moment, nodding her head and smiling. As she speaks, her voice is surprisingly coarse—a cigarette voice.

  “She says Katie is very beautiful.”

  “And so is she,” Pep says, with a broad smile. Rhett gives him a look, and translates. Ming Tao laughs, pats her hair, extends her hand. Each of them shakes it. Tao says something to Rhett.

  “She says please sit down and she will make you some silver needle tea.”

  They sit around the table, on four unrelated wooden chairs.

  “Silver needle tea,” Clio says. “That sounds so fascinating. What is it?”

  Ming Tao speaks for a while, to Clio’s ears all clangs and bangs, and gestures gracefully out the window toward the palms—are they to think that the tea comes from palm fronds? Tao puts a hand on each hip and, smiling, waits for Rhett to translate.

  “She says it is a very special tea that comes from Junshan Island. It is one of the greatest teas in all of China. It will amaze you because when you put it in your cup it stands up on its end like silver needles, and emits a fragrant odor.”

  “Tell her we will be very happy to share her silver needle tea,” Clio says.

  “Can I have a Sprite?” Katie asks.

  Rhett translates. Ming Tao seems embarrassed, and says that she does not have soda, just water. Bottled water? No, from the tap. She offers to go out and buy some.

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Pep says quickly. “Tell her we don’t have time.”

  Rhett tells her, and she nods. She prepares and pours the tea. Sure enough, the leaves are all silvery, and in the cups, they do stand up on end. Clio watches Pep put his nose almost into the needles to catch the fragrance. By his glance she knows that he hasn’t smelled anything, but he nods and smiles at Ming Tao as if he has.

  “You don’t smell anything?” Ming Tao asks, through Rhett.

  On his face is a startled look—Clio knows he realizes that Ming Tao has read him correctly. “Nope,” he says, “I can’t.”

  “I smell it,” Clio says, “and it’s delicate, very wonderful. Very fragrant, yes, yes. Thank you so much. Shay shay. Want a taste, Katie?”

  “Mom, you know I don’t like tea.” Why’s she embarrassing me, in front of her?

  More smiles, then silence.

  Pep looks around. A tiny room. A door leads to another, what has to be a bedroom. A narrow stairway up. Cement walls, gray and unpainted. Two small windows, one partly blocked by the palms. Little color, no plants. He finds himself staring at a spot above the stove where there is a wooden panel to which spidery wires come, join up with each other in little boxes, and then go out again. The wires travel on the wall making right-angle turns here and there, walking to the stove and snaking up across the ceiling to the hanging wire of the light bulb, the wires tacked to the bare wall and ceiling by small steel brackets. No covering for the wires, the wooden panel, the little boxes. No insurance coverage possible. A risk.

  From a large nail on another wall, a black plastic hanger hangs. On the crosspiece, two plastic clothespins, in pink. The higher up he looks, the sootier it grows. It is overwhelmingly ugly, dead ugly. As he looks back at her he is startled—she has seen, in his eyes, his sensing the ugliness and maybe even the potential danger of living here. She holds his glance for a second, and he realizes that she feels the same. She shifts in her chair and runs her hand through her luxurious hair, sending fresh fingers of alluring perfume into the air, and smiles at him—a smile he takes to mean “Yeah, it’s a dump. I deserve better, maybe even deserve what you’ve got, and I’ll do what it takes to get out.”

  “I saw you at the police station,” Ming Tao says suddenly, through Rhett.

  “Yes, we saw you too,” Clio answers.

  “But I did not see her,” she says, pointing to Katie.

  “She was lying down in the bus.”

  Ming Tao laughs heartily. She takes out a pack of Chinese cigarettes and offers them around. Rhett smiles, and proudly produces a pack of his own, clearly a luxury brand. Tao nods appreciatively and takes one. Rhett flicks his Tang-Dynasty-warrior lighter. They puff contentedly. To Pep, the smoke is as harsh as Ming Tao’s voice. He starts to worry about his and his family’s breathing. He looks around the tiny hot kitchen for a source of circulating air, and finds none. The room grows dim.

  “And if you don’t mind us asking,” Clio says, “why were you there?”

  13

  Ming Tao tells the story rapidly and in a voice that seems to Pep way too loud for the room. He worries that the crowd outside is hearing it all, and wishes they had some privacy. Rhett translates rapidly. “I am Second Sister, Big Sister to your mother.”

  Katie looks up quickly, then back down. She keeps her face stiff, not showing anything, but she feels her belly go funny.

  “Okay,” Pep says, in a tone of let’s-get-down-to-it, “what about her mother.”

  Clio locks eyes with him. To her he seems incredibly blunt about this, a delicate matter, and his imbecilic use of the term “mother” instead of “birth mother” feels to her like a betrayal. Should she ask Rhett to clarify the terms?

  “She is Third Sister. Her name is Xiao Lu.”

  Clio feels a chill. Her name. Finally. Once again she feels like she’s about to break down. As she tries to get herself under control Pep barges in.

  “Is she alive?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “When is the last time you saw her?”

  “I saw her, let’s see, about one year ago.”

  “And, Tao Ayi,” Clio says quietly, shyly, bringing a smile to Ming Tao’s lips, “your sister, um... Xiao Lu, she is quite well?”

  Ming Tao hesitates.

  Clio and Pep glance at each other.

  “Yes.” She smiles. “And no.”

  More smiles, but when she goes on she seems more tentative, or even irritated, or perhaps contemptuous—all of which Clio finds strange. But perhaps she simply is misreading the woman, for Ming Tao is smiling all the while. “Two years ago, on the eighth anniversary of the day she left baby Chwin in Changsha, my sister took the train back there, back to Changsha.” She pauses, takes out another cigarette. Rhett lights it for her, flicking his Tang-warrior lighter with a certain flair.

  Clio reacts strongly to this, the first time she’s heard Ming Tao call Katie by her Chinese name. She has heard it from Hongyen Ayi at the orphanage, but still is struck to hear it here, as if it is confirmation that Katie truly is someone else, that everything Clio has only partly admitted she is now forced to face, to admit with a terrifying certainty. To her she is Katie, not Chun, and certainly not this “Chun” that sounds like “Chwin.” But the stiff way that even Rhett pronounces “Katie” and the easy lilting pronunciation of “Chwin” drive the point home with the sudden pain of a splinter.

  “Xiao Lu waited all day outside Social Welfare Center Number One. She hoped to find out something, anything, about what happened to he
r baby—if she was still there, if she was still in Changsha, or in some other part of China. She saw nothing, spoke to no one. Third Sister is very shy. Not like me!” She laughs hard at this. “But on that day she saw a group of Western people with Chinese babies going into the Grand Sun Hotel. She went up to the Chinese doorman outside the hotel and asked who they were. He said they were Norwegian people, who had just taken eight babies from the orphanage the day before. She asked more about this. The guard told her that all the babies are adopted by Western people, some from Europe, most from America. This upsets my sister very much. She thinks—America! That is so far away! My baby is gone!” Ming Tao strikes a dramatic pose of exaggerated grief, and waits for Rhett to translate. “So then she takes the train back—she is so upset she doesn’t even stop and see me here in Tienja—and she goes back home, to her home on the mountain. But then the next year—one year ago now—on the same day, the anniversary of when she left her baby, she gets on the train here again, to go there. But she can’t do it. She gets on the train and she can’t breathe! She feels she will die if she doesn’t get off the train! She is used to breathing clean air—she lives in mountains for the last three years! The mountain air is very good, and the air here is terrible, and...” She takes a deep drag, blows out two dragon plumes of significant smoke, and laughs hard at the terribleness of this air.

  “And what?” Pep asks, pressing harder, as if ferreting out a lie on an insurance application, trying to uncover “a disease or mental defect.”

  “Oh I don’t know.”

  “Okay, trouble with the bad air here.” He tries to clear his throat of the jagged black needles of cigarette smoke. “So a year ago she gets off the train?”

  “And visits me here, right here in this room.” She gestures around the room. Pep, Clio, and Katie look around, as if something of her is still there. “And she tells me this story, and she is sad that she will never go back to Changsha again, never find her baby, and she is very broken-down by this, crying and crying, and she leaves, and that is the last time I see her. But anyway, for my business, my dress shop, I go to Changsha maybe every other month—to see the new clothes from Hong Kong—and from Milan and America too!—I love Milan and America very much!—Donna Karan DKNY! I love Changsha City—such a lively city and the shops are so bright and full of things to buy—like the Apollo Commercial City on Shaoshan Lu—did you go there?”

  “No, we missed it,” Clio says. “But what happened to her?”

  “So big and clean and magic! And at night, Changsha City comes alive! Like it must be Times Square, or Broadway, or SoHo—Donna Karan lives in SoHo, no?”

  “We don’t know where Donna lives,” Pep says. “Rhett, help!”

  “And so,” Ming Tao goes on, “after my talk with Third Sister, and her being broken-down so badly by abandoning Chwin, the next time when I go to Changsha on business, I take the bus to Social Welfare Center, to find out more. The big gate is closed. There is a guard. He will not talk to me. I talk to the doorman at the Grand Sun, and we talk a lot about Americans he sees there with their babies, and he tells me one thing very important—Americans go nuts with their child’s birthday. Sometimes he sees Americans have a birthday party in the hotel, for their other kids? They take over the whole restaurant! Back in America they hire clowns, animals, magicians, even a circus! Spend a lot of money! So I think, hmm, Tao, if they come back here with Chun, maybe they come back on her birthday—what an opportunity!” She laughs, stubs out her cigarette, and stands before them, an actress on a stage. “I know Chwin’s birthday, so I plan my next dress shop trip for that day. Last Monday, on her birthday, I watch from a store across from Welfare Center. But I don’t see anyone! Third Sister said other mothers told her to leave Chwin near a police station, because when she is found she will be taken right to the police station, then to the orphanage. She found the Nan Da Lu station, and left Chwin in the nearest market, down an alley, in the vegetable stand. Hidden in a pile of celery. They find her right away. Xiao Lu visited that market again, the time she went back.”

  Celery! In a pile of celery? Clio looks down at Katie, who seems caught up in thought. She brings her chair closer, so their legs touch, and puts her arm around her.

  Katie tries to picture herself as a baby in a pile of celery. Suddenly she feels a clenching up inside, like her insides have turned into a big fist, twisting.

  “So I think maybe Chwin on her birthday will visit the police station. I leave a friend to keep watching the closed gate of the Welfare Center and I walk the one block over to the police station. I see you, but I do not see a Chinese girl with you. It is dangerous for someone like me to be there all the way from Tienja, so I go in and pretend to have business, give them my name and address, and get out fast.” With a satisfied smile, the performance done, she sits back down.

  “Incredible,” Clio says. “Like magic, Katie, isn’t it?”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Okay. Now.” Pep is trying to bring the thing back down to earth, to the facts they need. “When we asked about her health, why’d you say ‘yes and no’—is she sick?”

  “She’s very good.”

  “Is there something more, something wrong with her, physical or mental?”

  “Pep, please—”

  “It’s important. Ask her, Rhett.”

  When Rhett translates, a shadow flickers across her face, but she brightens again. “No, she needs clean air, that’s all. Very shy, and lives alone on the mountain, and she is not interested in fashion, but she is good. Smart. Artistic. Our father, he is crazy.”

  “Crazy?” Pep blurts out, imagining a dozen genetic risk factors.

  “Broken by the Red Guards. They left him his house and a few fields, but he... After our mother died he stops. He sits and talks to himself. And sees things that aren’t there and talks to them, talks to his past. He wraps up tobacco leaves in newspaper, big rolls, and smokes them.” She laughs, takes a newspaper, and, with comic drama, demonstrates, making a funny face at Katie, who smiles awkwardly. “But he is happy! His mind is focused on the time before Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward! The Years of Starvation when I and Third Sister were born. In the Great Leap Forward we had nothing to eat! We ate nuts and berries!” She laughs, earthily, as if, Pep thinks, she’s enjoying her insane father’s predicament and the irony of Mao’s dictate that all Chinese have to leap forward by starving to death. Is her blunt laughter of derision? Horror? The mere folly of it all? Who knows.

  “And your mother died of... ?” Pep asks, actuarial to his core.

  “Exploding heart.”

  “Heart attack—good to know. At what age?” She thinks about sixty. Make a mental note: get Katie screened for cholesterol/lipids.

  “Are you okay hearing all this, dear?” Clio asks Katie.

  “He went crazy? Like why?”

  “Because the Chinese government treated him very badly.”

  “Was my birth mom tortured too?”

  “No, she was only a child. No one would’ve hurt a child.”

  Ming Tao asks, “But why didn’t I see you go in the Welfare Center on her birthday?”

  “We were supposed to go there on her birthday,” Pep says, “but there was a mistake—our meeting was cancelled. We went the next day.” Was it only yesterday?

  She laughs at this mix-up.

  “But it’s quite a thing for you to do,” Clio says, “go all the way, alone, to Changsha, spend a whole day or two trying to find us, and then the long ride back.”

  “Yes,” Ming Tao says, “it is very hard for me to do.”

  “And why did you go on this... this mission for her?”

  “I feel bad for her, her life is not good. Both my sisters’ lives are not good, both First Sister and Third Sister. I feel bad I did not take care of Third Sister. I was Second Sister, her big sister, we swam in our river together, swam
and swam!—and then I didn’t take care of her. Now I have a debt. So I pay her—whenever I go to Changsha, I look for her baby—and now I pay her by finding Chwin and bringing her to her.”

  “Yeah, well,” Pep says, with a look to Clio, “we’ll have to think about that.”

  “But you, Ming Tao, you did this because you felt guilty?”

  Rhett translates this. Ming Tao does not understand. They go back and forth, with little luck. Finally Rhett says, “Guilt is not what she is saying. She feels ‘bad’ and ‘owes her sister a debt,’ which she has now partly paid, but there’s more to pay, by bringing you together with her and by being a good ayi to Katie. She said again how she has discovered pleasure in her life but her sister has not. That’s the best I can do.”

  Clio is startled to realize that she has forgotten Katie’s birth mom’s name. “God, Pep, these Chinese names—what was she called, Katie’s birth mom?”

  “I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Shi-ow Lu, Mom,” Katie says, and then emphasizes it. “Shi-ow Lu.”

  “Shi-ow Lu. Thanks. Oh—and Tao—you mentioned First Sister? Where is she?”

  Rhett translates, but Tao does not answer. Her face turns somber.

  Katie notices, feels how the flow of talk has been cut like with scissors, wonders about this First Sister.

  Finally, with a sigh, and a thin smile, Ming Tao asks, “Will you have more tea?”

  “No, no,” Pep says, abruptly. “Bottom line: Where is Xiao Lu right now?”

  “She lives alone on a mountain, far away. No phone.”

  “Can you give us her address?” Pep asks.

  She hesitates. “I am the only one who knows how to find her. You cannot find her without me. I can take you but... I am so busy here, with my shop, my family...”