The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  He held out his hand and said, ‘Call me Rocky – my American name.’ His voice was surprisingly deep.

  I said hello and touched his hand, and when I did my palm sprouted sweat like a sponge. His hand was square, broad-palmed, strongly lined, with large, curved nails; despite the film of sweat between us he held me firmly.

  Dr Zhang cleared his throat and frowned. ‘Zaofan is waiting-for-employment,’ he said. ‘That’s what we call it here, when students leave school and then wait and wait to be assigned to a job that never appears. He has made a small business selling jeans, radios, cigarettes on the street; he makes more money than we, his parents. All illegal. His friends, those liumang – they are profiteers. Petty thieves.’

  ‘What should I do?’ Rocky said. ‘What else is there for me?’ He squeezed my hand before he let it go, and in an echo of his father’s mocking voice he said, ‘Some must get rich first. That’s the new party line.’

  ‘That’s the current wind,’ his father said bitterly. ‘You should be less like tree, more like bamboo. The wind now is just like it was in the early sixties – free markets, individual contracts, go-it-alone. But a new wind can come, as winds did then. Even a new Gang of Four … you wait. Old Deng is so old his brain has turned to stone.’

  Rocky shrugged as if he’d heard all this before, and Dr Yu smiled nervously. They might have been any family back home, the anxious parents of one of the boys I’d hung out with when I was fat and dressed in black and was everybody’s bad girl. Rocky shot me a small, conspiratorial smile, which I tried not to return but did. ‘Liumang,’ he said to me. ‘Means hoodlum. You like what my father calls me?’

  Dr Yu, who’d been watching all this, tugged me into the kitchen. No bigger than a closet, it had gray, unpainted concrete floors and blue-painted concrete walls. A small wooden refrigerator was jammed next to the sink, beneath a pair of rude cupboards. She unwrapped the chicken she’d bought and placed it, head and beak and all, in a covered wok. Then she opened a bottle of beer and poured it into two heavy glasses. ‘Do not mind Zaofan,’ she said, gulping at her beer. ‘He is – what do you say? – in a stage right now.’

  ‘I don’t mind him at all,’ I said. My left hand found its way to my right arm, which felt hot. I stroked the skin above my elbow as if I could stroke my fever down, and Zillah with it. ‘He’s charming,’ I said to Dr Yu. ‘Your son, I mean. He seems very bright.’

  She made a wry face. ‘He likes all things American,’ she said. ‘Music, dance, sunglasses, art. All he knows of politics is the Cultural Revolution – bad times, bad food, no school, struggle sessions. Political education meetings every day. Everything is bad for him because of us. He got in some trouble selling dried sweet-potato slices he appropriated, perhaps without full permission. Also a few things later on. Now the art school refuses him because of his record, and so he has to work at this odd job. He makes his father unhappy.’

  ‘His father seems unhappy,’ I said, thinking how much the set of Dr Zhang’s mouth resembled Walter’s.

  ‘Always,’ Dr Yu said, making another face.

  Those were the last words Dr Yu and I exchanged alone that night. The four of us sat stiffly in straight chairs, eating dumplings and pressed doufu and the chicken Dr Yu had steamed with soy and ginger, and we talked as if we’d been elected by church committees to demonstrate cultural exchange. Science and daycare and education, all dry as dirt; the weather. The state of the world. My fever seemed to come and go, heat rushing from my feet to my face like a wave and then subsiding, leaving me cold and dry. ‘Women hold up half the world,’ Dr Yu said. ‘That is our slogan. We work the same jobs as men, receive the same money, have the same responsibilities. But somehow all the household chores are also still ours. Is this true for you?’

  I rolled my eyes and Dr Zhang sniffed. ‘I have marketed,’ he said. ‘Many times.’

  Dr Yu looked at him skeptically and changed the subject to my rehabbing career, not understanding that I’d put it behind me. ‘Re-habbing?’ Dr Zhang said. ‘As in re-habilitation?’

  I nodded.

  ‘We know about rehabilitation,’ he said bitterly. ‘We have been rehabilitated ourselves.’

  ‘Here?’ I said, misunderstanding him completely.

  ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Us. Ourselves. What could you do with this place? What could anyone do? And this is an excellent apartment for Beijing, we waited six years for my danwei to assign it to us. Excellent, of course, unless you’re a high Party cadre. You could work for them, perhaps …’

  ‘What is danwei?’ I asked.

  Dr Zhang scowled. ‘You don’t know danwei?’ I didn’t; there had been no such thing in Uncle Owen’s time. ‘Danwei is work unit,’ Dr Zhang continued. ‘In the city, danwei is everything. Not just the working place but more like a village, or a tribe – our food coupons come from our danwei. Our apartment belongs to mine. Our children’s school, permission to marry or move – all is danwei. Danwei is god.’

  Rocky interrupted him and said eagerly, ‘You have redone houses? You know about architecture? And art?’ I nodded – at least part of that statement was true – but his father cut us off again.

  ‘Art?’ Dr Zhang said. ‘We have had no good art for forty years – not since my grandfather’s time.’ He sighed and adjusted his belt. ‘My family were scholars,’ he said. ‘Always. Scholars, teachers, doctors, all in Suzhou. We suffered during the Japanese occupation, and also after Liberation because of our bad class origins, but we struggled hard and I passed the exam to come here to Beijing for medical training.’

  He gestured toward his wife. ‘Her family were teachers also. But they supported the Party – her father even came back here from America. And she passed the university exams with high marks, and they took her here also, at Qinghua. We married in 1961, during the famine, after I had already started work as a surgeon and when she graduated and started teaching. But then 1966 came and they decided we were bad – bad families, bad education, bad attitude not with mass line. In 1969 they sent us to Shanxi province for laogai – labor reform. You know about this?’

  I nodded. I had heard.

  ‘We lived in huts. She helped the workers raise pigs. I worked in the brigade clinic, training barefoot doctors. The nurses there, who knew little, made me do cleaning and low work to improve my attitude. No paper, no books, no supplies. No school for our children. Zaofan was six already when we were sent down; Zihong was a baby and Weidong was born there. “Eliminate the four olds,” they said – old ideas, old habits, old customs, old culture. Ha! Almost, they eliminated us. I spent all that time, six years almost, building a memory palace and filling it with all I ever learned. Later, we were rehabilitated – “Sorry,” they said. “We made a mistake. Here is your old life back.” As if it could ever be the same.’

  His voice was as dry and cold as if these events had happened to someone else. Rocky had dropped his sunglasses over his eyes as his father spoke, so that no one could read his expression. Dr Yu stared at her hands, which lay quietly in her lap. ‘Noodles,’ she said in a faraway voice. ‘Millet. The Shanxi vinegar was as thick as oil, and it smelled like mold.’ She shuddered and helped herself to more beer and chicken.

  I tried to make myself as small as possible, hiding the folds of flesh I’d built with chocolate bars, mashed potatoes, steak, oysters, cake. Dr Zhang, as if reading my shame, pushed the platter of dumplings toward me and raised an eyebrow when I shook my head no. ‘Is this enough for you?’ he asked, his eyes roaming over my bulk. ‘Meiguo ren – Americans – you are used to different food.’

  I changed the subject. ‘What is this memory palace?’ I asked.

  Dr Zhang seemed surprised. ‘You’ve never heard of this?’

  I shook my head. Dr Zhang looked at his wife and said, ‘You explain it best.’

  Dr Yu sighed delicately, the same sort of ladylike puff I often found myself making at home when Walter tried to draw me out during one of our endless faculty dinners. ‘It’s an ol
d idea,’ she said. ‘It was brought to China by a missionary named Li Ma-tou, and passed down and down for the use of students taking examinations. You make a mental picture for each thing you wish to remember, then put each picture in a corner of a room of the building – the palace – you have in your mind. My own mother learned this, in her Catholic school.’

  Dr Zhang interrupted his wife and turned to me. ‘You wish to learn?’ he said, with the first spark of interest he’d shown all night. ‘It’s a good way to remember Chinese characters.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. Rocky frowned and left the room.

  ‘Pick a place you know well,’ Dr Zhang said. ‘Any place – only make sure you can see all the rooms and details clear in your mind.’

  I closed my eyes and recalled the house I’d grown up in, the one I’d described to Dr Yu. I saw each door and window, each corner and crevice, each cupboard and table and chair.

  ‘Now,’ Dr Zhang said, ‘you stick pictures of things you want to remember in those places, where your mind can always find them.’ He picked up a book and said, ‘The character for your word book is shu – sounds like English “shoe.” You have a bookshelf in your palace?’

  I nodded. In the den where Mumu used to sleep was a small wooden bookcase crammed with her Swedish books.

  ‘Imagine a shoe, then – a particular shoe, one you like very much. Place this on the bookcase, which is in a particular room. Now, whenever you want to remember the word for “book,” you will go to that bookcase in your mind and always you will see the shu.’

  I wasn’t sure about this, but I smiled as if I understood. I didn’t want to tell him that a good memory wasn’t something I desired. I’d spent years trying to forget all sorts of things.

  ‘You see the idea,’ Dr Zhang said. ‘It’s a way of holding concepts in your head by making abstractions concrete and arranging them in order.’

  ‘What did you use for your palace?’ I asked him.

  ‘My parents’ house,’ he said. ‘They had an old, courtyard-style house, with many rooms and central gardens. You have seen these?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said, and Dr Yu smiled at the phrase. ‘Out near the Fragrant Hills Park. There are some like that, but they’ve all been converted to apartments.’

  ‘When we were young,’ Dr Yu said softly, ‘where we grow up in Suzhou, we have these houses in our families for generations …’

  Dr Zhang made a small, courtly bow toward his wife and smiled his first smile of the evening. ‘Suzhou is famous for its beautiful gardens and beautiful, melodious women,’ he said. ‘Even Marco Polo said so. The house I lived in when I was young had many rooms, many secret places, and I used all of them. In Shanxi, I filled those rooms with every fact I ever learned in school, French and English and anatomy and chemistry and all the knowledge of Chinese traditional medicine I learned from my father – everything. I tried to store whatever I knew, so that someday I could teach my children and others. And now Zaofan sells radios he gets from nowhere …’

  I let this all sink in, and then I turned to Dr Yu and said, ‘Did you do this too?’

  She smiled and nibbled at a dumpling. ‘I forgot what I’d learned,’ she said. ‘Forgot on purpose. I tried instead to dream of life to come.’

  ‘That’s important,’ I said, and we looked at each other for a long minute. Life to come, I thought. Sometimes that was all that had kept me going.

  ‘You should use this system,’ Dr Zhang said. ‘Try it. It works.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. I couldn’t see that I’d ever want it, but I knew enough to thank him for the gift.

  Getting me home proved harder than any of us might have guessed. The streets outside were empty, of people as well as cars, and the four of us walked six blocks to a small guesthouse before we could find a working phone. When the cab Dr Zhang called finally drove up, the driver, who spoke no English, took one look at me and shook his head. Two firm movements, the same movements the driver in front of the Forbidden City had made. In the dim light of the doorway I looked down at my white skirt and saw how inappropriately I was dressed. How inappropriate I was – my hair hanging down in a pale sheet, the gold watch on my wrist, the silk scarf draped across the front of my blouse. Everything about me proclaimed my separateness. There were buses leading back to the Fragrant Hills, but I couldn’t be put on them. This guesthouse where I stood was forbidden to me. I was very thirsty, but the water dripping from the outside tap might as well have been salt. Like some pale, consumptive child, I needed bottled water and special food and private transportation. Of course the driver didn’t want to take me – who would want the responsibility?

  Dr Zhang placed his hand on the driver’s elbow and spoke softly but firmly to him. ‘He doesn’t know the hotel,’ Dr Zhang said a minute later. ‘But he knows the Fragrant Hills – can you find the hotel once you’re in the park?’

  My room, calling me again; my room, which was almost as big as their apartment. ‘I think so,’ I said. I smiled at the driver, trying to look competent and undemanding. Trying not to show my discomfort – it was past midnight already and I knew that the Exhibition Hall had long since closed, that Walter and Katherine Olmand and the other scientists who’d gone in a group to watch dancers in fake folk costumes and acrobats with flaming hoops must be back at the hotel already, sound asleep. Except that Walter wouldn’t be asleep, because of me. Walter would be pacing the carpeted floor and tapping his index finger against the crystal of his watch. I looked at Dr Yu and Dr Yu looked at me. ‘I kept you too late,’ she murmured.

  Rocky stepped forward. He’d said little all evening, but now he looked at his mother and announced his plan. ‘I’ll go with her,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe otherwise.’

  The family held a whispered conversation I couldn’t understand, and Rocky shifted a flat cardboard package under one arm. He’d picked this up as we’d left his parents’ apartment, and I had seen his mother give him a puzzled glance. ‘Wo qu,’ Rocky said, and then he repeated himself in English. ‘I’ll go.’

  There was more conversation I didn’t understand, and then Dr Zhang, glaring at Rocky, said, ‘I accept. You take the bus back.’

  I slipped Dr Yu my phone number at the hotel and she promised to call me. Then Rocky and I settled into the cab’s back seat, which was slipcovered in brown fabric and dotted with crocheted antimacassars. Lucky you, Zillah said. This boy … I jumped and Rocky’s knee touched my thigh.

  ‘Go to the clinic tomorrow!’ Dr Zhang shouted as we drove away. ‘To clinic!’

  As soon as we left them we were lost, but Rocky and I were so caught up with each other that we didn’t notice at first. ‘So,’ he said to me. ‘Did you have a nice evening?’ And then he laughed as if he’d said the funniest thing in the world. ‘Be more like bamboo, less like tree,’ he added in his father’s voice. ‘Unbelievable. Did he drive you crazy?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘He made me sad. All the things that have happened to him …’

  Rocky smiled and touched my hand. ‘You’re so nice,’ he said. ‘So beautiful.’ He had less of a Beijing accent than either of his parents, but he had something else I didn’t recognize at first. I had to fight off an urge to seize his fingers before he moved his hand away.

  I laughed nervously. ‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said. ‘Mostly everyone thinks I’m too fat. Especially my husband.’

  ‘You are kidding,’ Rocky said. ‘You look like a Rubens. Or a Rembrandt.’

  He edged closer to me on the seat and I edged away. My palms were drenched again. ‘How do you know so much about Western art?’ I asked.

  ‘That is my dream,’ he said. ‘I have loved it since I was little. In the country, where we were sent, was a farmer from Manitoba who came here to help the peasants farm better. He made friends with me when I was small – he was who taught me English.’

  His voice, now that I listened again, had a faint Canadian ring to it.

  ‘Wilkins,’ Rocky said dreamily. ‘That was his
name. He was an amateur painter, and he used to put his easel in the fields and paint when he wasn’t working. He taught me drawing, and also let me look at his books from home. All kinds of art books, that I could look at as long as I wanted. I thought I could be like him when I grew up. I knew nothing about politics then – nothing. If anyone had ever told me that I’d be selling clothes on the street, and that there would be no good job for me ever …’

  He reached into his cardboard package, which he’d laid on the seat between us, and he drew out a Rapidograph and a magnifying glass. ‘He gave me these,’ Rocky said. ‘My two best things in the world.’

  ‘They’re lovely,’ I said. ‘Where do you get the ink?’

  ‘I have to grind it myself,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s never as good as the ink Wilkins had – I use the ink cake we have here, for calligraphy, and I mix a special formula. But sometimes it clogs my pen.’

  I looked out the window and couldn’t recognize anything, despite all the times I’d been driven between the Fragrant Hills and the city. The driver, who’d been silent so far, caught my eye in the mirror and quickly looked away.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked Rocky.

  He looked around. ‘No idea,’ he said. He leaned forward and spoke quietly to the driver and then leaned back against the seat, close to me. ‘The driver says we are west of the airport, and east of Qinghua. He thinks. But do not worry.’

  ‘I’m glad you came along,’ I said. ‘I’d be nervous by now if you weren’t here. I hate that I can’t get around by myself.’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I will take care of you.’ And I felt that he would, somehow; that he had a store of resourcefulness and intelligence that would keep me safe. ‘Why does your husband let you out alone like this at night?’ he asked. ‘He must be blind.’