She fell into a brooding silence, and after a while her friends left.
One evening, when they were chopping up the makings of a salad, Fred said hesitantly, “So who are those people helping us? And what was that group you met in that cellar in Shekou? And what did you say to them?”
“They were migrants, there in Shekou,” she said, chopping faster than Fred could imagine chopping. It was alarming: chopchopchopchopchop! “Migrants, and migrant advocates.”
“They looked Chinese to me.”
She stared at him. “Internal migrants.”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you know about the hukou system?”
“No. Tell me.”
She sighed at his ignorance. “In China, where you are born determines your whole life. You’re assigned a household registration tied to your birthplace, and that’s the only place you can legally live, unless you get registered somewhere else by getting a registered job, or getting into a school. But those are hard things to get, and most people have to stay where they were born. So if you’re born out in the country, that’s it. And life there is so hard it’s almost like the Middle Ages. Subsistence farming, not much money, not much to do. People go hungry there, sometimes. So lots of people leave their legal residence and come to the cities to find work. Those are the migrants.”
“Are there a lot of them?”
She gave him one of her hard looks. “Five hundred million people, is that a lot?”
“Um, yes.”
“One-third of all Chinese. More than all the people in America.”
“Really?”
“Really. And the thing is, since these people aren’t in the cities legally, they can’t get health care or put their kids in school. And their employers can exploit them, pay them crap and not provide any worker safeguards. When they get sick they have to go home to where they are registered. Same when they lose their jobs. If they get robbed, they can’t go to police.”
“That sounds bad.”
“Yes! It’s part of what’s called the crisis of representation, and maybe the biggest part. Lots of people in this world have no real representation in government. Not just China, but everywhere. America too. So now, in China, all kinds of migrant networks have developed as work-arounds. Groups from the same region, or groups sharing information by word of mouth, so that they can find out where the informal pay is highest. They also try to protect each other, like with private security or militia. And there are foremen who hire them who are better than others. But even so, they’re vulnerable. They’re second-class citizens. Sometimes the Party has tried to reform the system, but it’s too big, and the urban Chinese who have a good hukou have advantages they don’t want to share. They’re like the middle class anywhere. With so many poor people in this world, can the middle class afford to share? If they do, won’t they become just as poor as the poor? So a lot of privileged Chinese, and a lot of Party members, are not in any hurry to reform. Why get rid of such a big pool of cheap labor? And so five hundred million people live like illegal immigrants in their own country. It’s like the caste system in India! They’re not untouchables, but no one touches them. And all because they were born in the back country. Waidiren means people from outside the city. Nongmingong means peasant workers, but now it’s another word for these people. So is diduan renkou, the low-end population.”
“So what did you say to them?” Fred asked, remembering their faces.
“I told them they’re a force! They’re the workers, the people. Renmin! The Chinese revolutions were all won by the masses. So these words in Chinese are very powerful politically. Renmin, that’s the people. Qunzhong, that’s the masses. Dazhong, that’s like the common people. Now people are using these words again, and sharing sayings from the 1911 revolution, and the war against Japan, and the Communist revolution. Lots of people are quoting Mao again, and not just baizuo, white leftists that means, meaning people like you from the West telling us what to do.”
“I never did that.”
She laughed. “I should hope not, you know so little! But that doesn’t always stop people.”
“So they’re organizing?”
“Yes. But offline. It’s not a netizen thing. The netizens are mostly urban youth, content to live in their wrists and get by in the gig economy. They’re not working-class, they’re the hollowed-out middle class. Often very nationalistic. They’ve taken the Party line, and they don’t see how much they have in common with the migrants. They’re the precariat, do you know that word? No? Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat. For us here, it’s the withouts. The two withouts, the three withouts, there are all kinds of variations on the withouts, but the main without is a hukou registration where you actually work. Those are the people you saw in that room.”
“And are you their leader?”
“I’m one of them,” she said after thinking this over for a while. “It didn’t make sense at first, because I’m a princeling and a woman, and I’ve lived abroad, and my dad is in the Party leadership. But all that might be part of it. I work well as a figurehead. But I want to be more than a figurehead, so I help organize things. Chinese revolutionary movements have often had woman leaders. There was the one in the White Lotus revolt, and the one who fucked things up at Tiananmen Square. And Jiang Qing for that matter, Mao’s wife. Or Empress Dowager Longyu, who ran things at the end of the Qing dynasty. And there’s been various other empresses who seized power when their husbands died.”
“How did a woman fuck things up at Tiananmen Square?”
“She wanted bloodshed more than reform. And she got it.” She chopped up a carrot as if she were beheading this person. It was truly impressive how fast she could chop vegetables. “Anyway it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Now is now. Now, Chinese women are fed up. We’ve always been second-class citizens. As Confucius recommends! That’s one reason I like the Maoists, they at least pretended to be feminists. Women hold up half the sky! But for most of Chinese history women have been internal migrants. They migrate from father’s family to husband’s family, and work like donkeys while keeping the whole thing going. Social reproduction they call it but really it’s everything. And for a long time with their feet squished to little balls so they couldn’t even walk. Now they’re workers too along with everything else, twelve hours a day in a factory sewing or running robots, then go home and do all the rest of it, and it’s just too much.” Chopchopchopchopchop! “We’re all mad. A lot of them are madder than I am! Because they’re the ones in the sweatshops. Sweet little Chinese girls all into their cloud games and pop stars, I tell you, they will jump out of their phones and kill you dead if they get a chance.”
“So … you’re doing a kind of united front?” Fred ventured.
“Exactly!” She stared at him, surprised. “Where did you get that? Are you pretending to be stupider than you really are?”
“No,” Fred said promptly.
She laughed at this promptness.
“So,” he said, pleased to have made her laugh in the midst of her chopping the world to bits, “all this happens offline?”
“Yes. It has to. But there are spies everywhere, of course. So the security agencies know what’s going on, and they’re trying to stop it. But the migrants use guanxi networks and word of mouth. It’s like a big family, and if you don’t trust someone with your life, you don’t talk to them about this stuff. The old cell structures have come back too, so if a cell gets penetrated it can’t bring down more than that one. And it helps a lot that the security agencies overlap, and they fight each other.”
“Why are there overlapping systems?”
She shrugged. “That’s China. The street council decides things, then the district, the town, the province, then the various economic agencies, all the way up to the top. So surveillance isn’t any more coordinated than resistance. And we’ve got the numbers. There’s about a hundred million Party members, and about five
hundred million internal migrants. That’s too many to control. Half a billion people—they can’t put them all in prison!”
“But they could put the leaders in prison,” Fred pointed out. “Then hope that that messes things up enough to keep a lid on dissent.”
She nodded, looking grim. “Right. So here we are.” She shrugged. She was back in hiding again, her look said. No choice. Trapped. Everything on the cutting board was chopped. It was going to be the finest-chopped salad Fred had ever eaten. Lucky they were using chopsticks rather than forks. “Let’s eat.”
Another time they were sitting in their little living room after eating a meal, sweating in the heat, both half-asleep. When they roused from this torpor, there was nothing to do. They had been in the apartment for nineteen days, by Fred’s count. Qi was bigger than ever. Her belly was growing day by day. She had cooked three meals already, and there was still time to kill.
“Tell me a story,” she demanded of him.
“I don’t know any stories,” he said, alarmed.
“Everybody knows some stories.”
“Not me.” Then he added, “What about those Swiss boarding schools? Why did you keep running away from them? I thought they were supposed to be nice.”
“No.”
“So you ran away, how many times did you say?”
“I don’t know. I can hardly remember.”
“Hard to believe.”
She laughed at this. “I guess that’s right. I remember.”
She sat there thinking for a while. There was no hurry. Finally she said, “When I was first sent to Switzerland, I was really mad. Hurt. It was my father’s doing, of course, although my mother went along with it, I’m sure. But he wanted me out of China, mostly to get an international education. Learn English, all that. He was probably right,” she added, nodding to herself. “So he sent me, and I was young enough that I decided it was because he didn’t love me.”
“How old were you?”
“About eleven or twelve, I guess. It was 2026 I think? So wait, I was nine. Wow, I had it wrong. That’s interesting. Anyway, I loved my father, and I thought he loved me, so he explained and explained why he was doing it, but I still felt betrayed. I was very mad at him. And at my mom too, for not defending me. But, you know. They bundled me off. And as it turned out, they sent me to a boarding school they had never been to, called Nouvelle École de l’Humanité, in the lower Alps, above Bern. I don’t know how or why they chose that one, because my mom wouldn’t have approved if she had known what it was like. But I think a friend of theirs raved about it, said it had been great for their daughter, another Party princess. So they sent me there sight unseen.”
“And it was bad?”
“I thought so at first. It was some kind of weirdo alternative education, based on Pestalozzi, or Steiner, or Piaget, I mean really who knows. The Swiss can be very theoretical. The couple who founded it were hippies of some kind, pretty crazy from the sound of it.”
“Baizuo?”
She laughed. “No, they just loved nature. The Alps in particular. So, we always got up before dawn and took cold showers to start the day, and then we cleaned out the stables, and then we farmed, and we killed and chopped up chickens, and climbed some Alps, and cooked and cleaned, and did lots of exercises, and like that.”
“And you hated it?” Fred guessed.
“Of course I did! At least at first. But then, just as I was getting used to it, my parents finally paid attention to the letters I was sending home. I had to write them on paper and send them by mail, it was like throwing them into the Aare in a bottle. None of us ever heard back from anyone. We had been forgotten. We were stuck in a hippie gulag. But finally my parents came for a visit, and they were horrified. Politely and without saying a word, I mean they were perfectly inscrutable Orientals to the people in charge there, but I could see it no problem. Oh my God, their princess getting her hands dirty! Their precious daughter shoveling horseshit! All of their Chinese elite instincts were appalled. The whole point of joining the Party is to get off the farm! So they got me out of there as fast as they could and put me in another boarding school near Geneva, in Lausanne. Beautiful place, looking across the lake at Mont Blanc, all that. But the girls there, this was a girls-only school, they were from all over, with money leaking out of every pore. And there weren’t any boys around to distract them and make them be nice. Very soon I hated those girls with all my heart. They were the ones who made me into a Maoist.”
“Radicalized by rich girls in a Swiss boarding school?”
“Definitely. I hated them so much. Racist assholes, that’s what they were. There’s an age where you shouldn’t put a bunch of girls by themselves. The mean girls’ club is a real thing. They’re worse than any boys I ever saw.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club. I think you probably need boys and girls together at that age more than any other. Anyway I hated them.”
“What did they do?”
“Oh, just the usual shit. I don’t want to tell you. It’s always the same kind of stuff. Just saying it repeats it, somehow.”
“Okay.”
“Like one time I came in on them and they were wearing some of my clothes and pulling their eyes to the side and singing ‘We are Siamese, if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please.’”
“Siamese?”
“Whatever! It was a cartoon song. I looked it up. About Siamese cats, it turns out. Pretty funny in fact. But to them I was a gook, a slant, a chink!”
Just saying it repeats it, Fred knew not to say; although it was painful to hear that grating sound in her voice. He said, “I’m surprised the school’s administrators let that kind of thing happen.”
“They never know what really goes on in the dorms.”
“I guess not. And so …”
“So that’s when I started making my escapes. You don’t just run away from those places, you’re locked in. You have to escape. So that took some work, because that place was a real prison. Part of the deal is if you pay a ton of money to put your daughter in a place like that, they stay there.”
“They’re safe.”
“Safe! Safe to live with horrible racist bitches! That’s right. So, I got away three times, got caught three times. The Swiss have way better surveillance than China, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had no friends or money. Once I just walked into the forest and got lost out there. But the Swiss even have their forests surveilled. So the third time they caught me, I begged my father to send me back to my first school. The École was looking like utopia at that point. And he let me do it. After that I was fine.”
“So he was …”
“My dad was okay. He is okay. He tries. In fact I think of myself as complementing his efforts from below. As a family we are a pincer attack, you might say. Not that he would agree with that. But I’ll convince him of it by the time it’s all over. I’ll make him see it. If he doesn’t die first of a heart attack at how bad I am.”
Another time she put her head back onto her chair back and sighed heavily. “But what about you?” she said again. “And don’t answer with a question.”
Fred shrugged.
“What brought you to the moon?”
“Just my job.”
“I know that. You are a quantum mechanic.” She laughed briefly. “But what brought you to your job?”
“Oh I don’t know.”
“You must like quantum mechanics?”
Fred tilted his head and thought about it. “Yes. I do.”
“So go on. Go backward from that. What brought you to quantum mechanics?”
“Oh I don’t know.”
Fred was not comfortable. He didn’t know what he could say about his past. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain it to someone else?
She waited him out, watched him think it over. Not a warm look, but not a sharp look. Not
irritated or annoyed or suddenly furious. Just watching. Curious. They had a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be able to outwait her. This was unusual; almost everyone else he had ever met in his life would get uncomfortable with his silences and then fill them, and he would be off the hook. Not this time.
“I didn’t fit in,” Fred finally said, surprising himself. “I never could quite get why people did what they did. I didn’t understand them. Or, I just couldn’t think fast enough. So everything was kind of mysterious. And, and, and … disturbing. So then, in my math classes, I could understand things. Things were clear. Like algebra. I liked algebra. Everything balanced out. And I could see things in geometry. Trig was geometry as processed by algebra, so I liked that too. Calculus was easy.”
She laughed. “That’s not a sentence you hear very often.”
“No, it’s easy. And then there was a little introductory unit on quantum mechanics, kind of to dispense with it and move on. And what the professor said about it was so weird and, and—and unlikely, that I got into it. It was interesting.”
“So that’s your biography? A list of your math classes?”
“I guess so.”
“What else did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what else did you do! In your life! Sports? Music? Theater? Dance? Travel? Friends? Romances?”
“No,” Fred said. That sounded a little extreme, all by itself, and so he added: “I mean, I had some friends.”
“Okay, good. That’s a start. Are you still in touch with them?”
“No.”
“Wow.” She stared at him. “You were a real geek.”
Fred sighed. “That’s one name people use.”
“What, there are others?”
Fred glanced at her, looked back at the floor. “You know there are.”
“What, like what?”
“Just saying it repeats it,” he said, swallowing hard.
“Really? That bad?”
He shrugged. “To think you’re a person, and then be told you’re a symptom? A diagnosis?”
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