The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  Despite that, he’d managed to profit from the confusion. ‘Upper-class people sold Ming furniture by weight,’ he’d told me. ‘Porcelains and paintings and bronzes went by the crate – everyone wanted to get rid of the things that betrayed their class status.’ He’d packed up his treasures and sent them home to Massachusetts, where they’d kept his business going for the rest of his life and had sustained me as well. Still, he swore his treasures were nothing compared to what had lain within the gated walls of the Forbidden City. He’d spent days in those dusty palaces, and had described them to me so many times that I’d dreamed of them. He’d once said something that made me sure the Temple of Heaven lay within the Forbidden City, so when I broke away from Walter and hired a cab to bring me to Dr Yu, I didn’t even check my guidebook.

  At Tiananmen, I dismissed my cab like a fool. The great gate guarding the grounds was still intact, as were the watchtowers guarding the corners, and after I paid my ten fen I stood inside the gate, right where Uncle Owen had been a score of times. I had a picture of him standing here, dressed in scholar’s robes and holding a sprig of flowering plum, and I had forty-five minutes in which to see some of what he’d loved.

  Only when I entered the first building did I remember the rest of Uncle Owen’s tale: the palaces had been looted twice, once by the Japanese and then again by the Kuomintang. Nothing was the way I’d pictured it. In the Three Great Halls, the surviving Ming and Qing relics were jumbled with treasures brought from all over China to fill the gaps. Song and Yuan paintings, water clocks, jade seals, cooking vessels, archeological finds; none of the rooms were intact, and they had the feel of a junk shop or of a museum exhibit hastily arranged by an amateur. The things were only things, dusty and out of place, and I couldn’t recapture Uncle Owen’s rapt appreciation.

  As I wandered past the Dragon Throne and the great bronze turtle whose mouth had once billowed smoke, I tried to feel the ghosts of the emperors and empresses, the eunuchs and the concubines, but the rooms were dead for me. I put my lack of interest down to tiredness and overexposure: I had seen too much in the past week, too much, too fast, too false. I turned away from the turtle and then I heard Zillah’s voice again: Of course you don’t like it, she said. The whole place is a lie.

  Seven days since I’d last heard her; her reappearance frightened me. I knew my bronchitis was getting worse and that the waves of heat and cold flooding me weren’t a good sign, but I wanted so much to see Dr Yu that I willed my hands to stop trembling and refused to acknowledge what I’d just heard. So I’d heard a voice; it was only a voice. Maybe I was starved for English words.

  ‘Where’s the Triple Sounds Stone?’ I asked out loud, as if someone might answer me. ‘It’s almost five.’

  A group of women stared at me warily.

  ‘Ni jiang Yingyu ma?’ I asked. ‘Do you speak English?’

  The women shook their heads and moved away.

  ‘Triple Sounds Stone?’ I said to everyone who passed. No one knew what I meant. I walked from hall to hall, up steps, down ramps, past carved pillars and painted dragons and another large bronze turtle, and still I couldn’t find the stone or Dr Yu. Five o’clock came and went, and then quarter past. I was trembling and weak and beginning to get concerned.

  A man with a black and red eye and a strangely twisted mouth approached me near the Dragon Throne, after I’d circled past for the third time. ‘You are lost?’ he said in English. ‘I may be of help?’

  I was so glad to hear his voice that I reached out and shook his hand. ‘I’m supposed to meet a friend,’ I said. ‘At the Triple Sounds Stone.’

  ‘You have no guide?’ he said. ‘You come here alone?’

  I nodded. I couldn’t help looking at his mouth, and he caught me. ‘My mouth twist from sleeping near open window,’ he said. ‘A draft. Please excuse this way I look. My eye – I have acupuncture for curing this mouth, and instead comes this coloring. You are American?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Your friend you meet is Chinese?’

  I nodded. ‘And I’m late. Already. And actually, I haven’t been feeling so well.’

  He looked at me gravely. ‘This is visible,’ he said. ‘You appear to have a deficiency of yin – your nose and throat feel dry?’

  ‘All the time,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Many fluids,’ he said. ‘Increase secretions. Also certain herbs are very helpful. Come – this stone is perhaps near south of compound.’

  We rushed through the halls at great speed, and only after a hot and sweaty thirty minutes did I think to mention to him that the Triple Sounds Stone was part of the Temple of Heaven. ‘I know it’s here,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know where. The stone is somewhere in the temple.’

  He groaned and pressed his small hands together. ‘Temple of Heaven?’ he said, his voice rising in real anguish. ‘Not Triple Sounds Stone – you are looking for Triple Echo Stones, in temple – is not here, is across city, twenty minutes at least by car, and how you will get a cab …’ With that he rushed me back to the main gate. There were taxis parked there, but all of them were spoken for, and after a long argument with two lounging drivers he dashed into the streaming traffic of Changan Avenue and tried his hardest to flag down one of the passing cabs. Finally he went to the white-coated policeman who stood on an island above the traffic, and by the time he’d finished shouting and throwing his arms about he’d convinced the policeman to step into the traffic himself and commandeer a cab. The driver resisted, pointing to me and then shaking his head, but he gave in when the policeman bundled me into the back seat.

  ‘Temple of Heaven?’ my rescuer said. ‘You are sure?’ I nodded and he gave directions to the driver. ‘How can I thank you?’ I asked.

  ‘You will get there,’ he called, as the car eased into the traffic. ‘No thanks are needed. But you must be more careful.’

  Careful wasn’t high on my list just then. If I’d been careful I would have spent the day in bed, tending to my bronchitis; I wouldn’t have left the hotel, unarmed with guides or books, in search of Dr Yu. All week I’d been listening to the humming voice of caution: Don’t drink the tap water; don’t even brush your teeth with it. Don’t eat any fruit or any street food. Don’t lose sight of the tour bus. Don’t go out without your passport. Don’t buy jade without an expert’s advice. That voice didn’t belong to Lou, our guide – it was the voice of breakfast, all the scientists and their spouses gathered at the long tables in the hotel dining room, exchanging warnings before they split up for the day. Don’t, don’t, don’t – the list was endless and expanded each hour, and it brought out the worst in me. It made me want to stick my head under the faucet and gulp the water down, to sink my face into one of the smoked ducks that hung by their twisted necks in the smeared shop windows. Our hotel room – large, clean, privileged – had come to seem like a cage, and even when I ventured outside I carried it on my back like a turtle’s shell.

  I wanted to leap from the cab and find my own way across the city, but instead I sat and watched the back of the sullen driver’s head. I was late, I reminded myself; I was an hour late already. I let the driver drop me off near the Triple Echo Stones, and I tried not to notice how he hovered until he saw Dr Yu reach out for me. She moved through a rushing stream of people, and she laughed when I apologized for being late and told her what had happened.

  ‘You must have been meant to go there,’ she said. ‘The places are separate, but also connected. In the old days, the Emperor marched out of the Forbidden City each October with his elephant carts and lancers and musicians and high nobles, and all of them headed here. The Emperor meditated in the Imperial Vault of Heaven, stayed all night in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, and made a ceremony next day at the Round Altar, which decided the future. People hid behind their shutters and prayed again and again for everything to go well. It is an ill omen if anything goes wrong here.’

  ‘Have we done anything wrong yet?’ I asked.

&n
bsp; ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together three times, a gesture left over from a time when I thought ruby slippers and a good witch could fix my life. My future, the one I’d been waiting for, seemed to lie just around the corner, and what I wished for was that it would hurry up.

  Dr Yu smiled at my antics. ‘Is your husband still angry?’ she asked.

  I leaned against a pillar and coughed. ‘Still,’ I said. Walter’s behavior at the banquet last night had broken down some of the barriers between Dr Yu and me, and I felt I could tell her the truth. She’d already seen him at his worst. ‘Madder, now, since I told him I was coming to meet you. He went with all the others to the Exhibition Hall, to see some singers and acrobats and stuff.’

  Dr Yu made a face. ‘That’s so boring,’ she said. ‘It is only for tourists. Why does he stay mad so long? Is this typical of those from North Dakota?’

  I laughed. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘How did you know where he’s from?’

  ‘I read it somewhere,’ she said. ‘I remembered it because my own father was trained near there – he got his PhD in Minnesota before the Anti-Japanese War. Physicist. After Liberation, he returned here to aid his country.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Dead,’ she said simply. ‘They put a high dunce cap on his head and paraded him through the streets of Shanghai during the early part of the Cultural Revolution. They called him an American spy, a counterrevolutionary, a capitalist roader. His hat said, “Cow’s ghost and snake’s spirit” – do you know this saying?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘My great-uncle used to tell me stories he learned here when he visited, about plants and rocks and snakes who could turn themselves into people and do remarkable things and then turn back to their original shapes.’

  ‘Different story,’ she said. ‘Cow’s ghost and snake’s spirit are demons who can assume human forms for the making of mischief. Mao said intellectuals resembled these – that they pretend to support the Party, like humans, but they revert to demons when criticized. They were called “cows” for short; they were locked up in places called “cowsheds.” My father was put in a cowshed at his institute. He died of fright, or shame, or anger – who knows? He had a bad heart.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said; I didn’t know what else to say. I’d hardly stopped to consider what her life had been like during those years, any more than I’d considered what she might want from me.

  She smiled quietly. ‘It is in the past,’ she said. ‘I only remember my father said people from cold places have cold hearts. Your uncle visited with us?’

  ‘My great-uncle,’ I said. ‘He visited many times before Liberation – it must have been around the same time your father was in the States.’

  ‘Such coincidence,’ she said, and then she waved her hand at the buildings behind us. ‘Do you like the temple?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. She showed me the sacred altar and the enormous vault and the main hall’s painted, swirling ceiling, and then we stood on the Triple Echo Stones and clapped our hands together, listening for the sound to return – another thing, I knew, that Uncle Owen had done. We were interrupted by a group of Japanese tourists, led by a woman with a bullhorn and an umbrella crowned with a yellow streamer. Video cameras sprouted like snouts from the faces of the men. Dr Yu and I moved away and examined an ancient tree and a garden of roses, all the time talking easily. I forgot about her family, waiting at home, and I remembered only when Dr Yu looked at her watch and said, apologetically, ‘It’s almost seven now – perhaps we should go?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ll take the local bus to my home. It’s very crowded, but not very far. You have ridden on one?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. The bus was one of the things we’d been forbidden.

  ‘You hang on then,’ she said. ‘Press when I say.’

  The bus that pulled up to the corner was full, overfull, bulging; it was absolutely impossible that anyone else should squeeze on. ‘PRESS!’ Dr Yu said as we reached the door, and then she shoved me into the tangled crowd. Her hands pushed my shoulders; her knees nudged mine; somehow we were on the bus and rattling down the street. People drew away from me, staring frankly at my eyes and breasts. I coughed loudly and they watched and coughed back. My chest was killing me. A baby three feet away turned and saw my face and burst into frightened cries, and Dr Yu apologized to his mother. We rode toward the setting sun, and at a street corner indistinguishable from the others Dr Yu wedged herself behind me and popped me through the open door. I tripped on the step.

  ‘We’ll walk now,’ she said. ‘Home is only three blocks away.’

  In the dusk the streets were lined with people. Old women crouched over charcoal braziers or bubbling woks, cooking their families’ meals. Clumps of children darted by, falling silent at the sight of me. A man in a blue jacket pedaled past, pulling a load of kindling on a cart, and a woman who hardly came up to my waist tottered by on miniature, once-bound feet. Above me I heard birdsong, and when I looked up a man tending bamboo cages on a balcony spat at my feet and then grinned, exposing three teeth. An outdoor market covered much of the sidewalk.

  Dr Yu inspected everything as we made our way between the stalls, naming what she touched for me. Zhusun, bamboo shoots; qiezi, eggplant; doufu, beancurd. The steamed buns were baozi and the duck, ya. I drew the words in happily but knew I’d lose most of them. Dr Yu explored four of the chickens, her hands pressing the breasts and thighs and checking the beaks and combs before she chose the fattest one. She paid with a handful of bills a third the size of my solemn Foreign Exchange Currency – tiny green notes printed with ships, even smaller mustard ones depicting trucks loaded with grain, misty mint ones bearing giant bridges. ‘Renmibi,’ she explained – the money Lou had forbidden us to have. ‘Peoples’ Money.’ She stuffed the newspaper-wrapped chicken under her arm.

  ‘We are here,’ she said, pointing at a cluster of six pale green, ten-story, cement-block buildings. She showed me the cluster’s coal-burning heating plant and its mountain of coal, as well as the primary school and the series of low bicycle sheds packed with identical bikes. But because she explained none of it, doing me the honor of acting as though I could understand what I saw, my head filled with questions as we climbed the unlit stairwell to her sixth-floor flat.

  Dr Yu’s husband was waiting for us inside the living room, hunched on a narrow couch and watching TV while his oldest son read. Both of them stood when Dr Yu brought me in. She said something quick in Mandarin and then she turned to me and said, ‘I present my husband, Dr Zhang Meng. Also my oldest son, Zhang Zaofan. Zaofan in your language means “Rebel.”’ I smiled and she turned to her family. ‘Meet Grace Hoffmeier,’ she said. ‘Wife of famous lake ecologist Doctor Professor Walter Hoffmeier.’

  I nodded, although I didn’t like being introduced as Walter’s wife. The elder Zhang bowed. ‘So pleased,’ he said dryly. ‘Your husband’s work is well known to my wife.’ Before I could respond, he gestured at the battered wardrobe, the sagging couch, the scarred table holding up the small black-and-white TV. ‘You will excuse our furnishings,’ he said. ‘All things of worth were taken from us. My father’s books, his scrolls …’ He shrugged. ‘It’s an old story,’ he said. ‘Same old story you hear from everyone.’

  He wore his gray pants belted high over a small round stomach, which seemed to stem more from his horrible posture than from any excess weight. His worn white shirt had a frayed collar, and his shoes were laced so tightly that I wondered if they weren’t a size too big. His eyes were deep-set, sunk in a nest of wrinkles, and they kept sliding to my hair. When I coughed, they shifted to my chest.

  ‘Bronchitis,’ I explained.

  ‘At least,’ he said. ‘At least. You should go to the doctor tomorrow if you’re not better – you know where Clinic for Foreign Visitors is?’

  I shook my head and coughed again.

 
‘You go,’ he said, scribbling the address on a scrap of paper. ‘Call me if you have any trouble. I work in the hospital wing next door.’

  ‘You’re a medical doctor?’ I asked, and then I remembered Dr Yu had told me this at the party and that in fact she’d offered to have her husband fix my cough. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I knew that. It’s just this fever, I’ve been confused …’

  ‘Thoracic surgeon,’ Dr Zhang said shortly. ‘This year, at least.’ He pursed his lips and, in a mincing voice said, ‘Is new Central Committee policy now: “Intellectuals are to be esteemed and treated as valuable.”’ He sounded as if he were quoting someone he didn’t much like.

  I stammered something clumsy and then turned toward the younger Zhang, who’d been waiting silently while his father spoke. Zaofan made me forget my cough and my discomfort with his father – in that tiny, shabby room, he stood out like a rhododendron. He was as beautiful as Randy, my first husband; as beautiful as Walter’s student who’d caused me all that trouble back home. He was as beautiful as any man I’d ever seen, and when he smiled I forgot my bronchitis, my weight, and my foreign face and I felt beautiful too. Voluptuous, not fat; smooth and expansive and well-tended and creamy-skinned. I forgot how I was supposed to act. I was middle-aged, I reminded myself. I’d been married for six years. The back of my neck began to sweat.

  Zaofan’s hair was long, held back by dark glasses, and he was dressed in jeans and a tight blue T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘Chongqing Construction Company – More, Better, Faster.’ A huge digital watch adorned his wrist. In Massachusetts, he would have looked hoody, but here I knew his appearance meant only that he was young, that he leaned toward Western ideas; that he was, or had been, a student. I’d seen thousands of young men dressed like him on the streets and the campuses. None of them had had Zaofan’s startling eyes or elegant bones, but many had shared his aura of eagerness.