The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  Walter’s face relaxed. ‘Dr Yu and her husband took care of Grace while she was sick,’ he said. ‘Her husband’s on the staff at the main hospital here. They’ve been very generous.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ Dr Yu said. She looked at the floor when Katherine and Quentin praised her kindness, and she changed the subject as quickly as she could. ‘I heard your presentation,’ she said to Katherine, and then she turned toward Quentin. ‘But not yours, I am sorry. What is your field of special interest?’

  Quentin answered her and then asked about her own work. As she described her research, Walter and Katherine listened as well, and for a few minutes Dr Yu basked in everyone’s attention. ‘It was a small study,’ she said modestly. ‘Money and equipment are limited, so I designed this to rely on human labor. I tried to take advantage of what we have. We analyzed the stomach contents of many fish, from samples taken over fifteen years …’

  While she talked, the hotel manager sidled up to me. ‘Our washing machines your clothes have destroyed,’ he whispered. ‘No one of us understands how. We offer largest apologies, and arrangings for compensations of the future will occur.’ He held an empty laundry bag in his hands.

  ‘Can we fix them?’ I asked. ‘Patch them up, somehow?’ I had given him almost everything I had.

  ‘Oh, completely not,’ he assured me. ‘Completely, they are destroyed to bits.’

  He pleated the bag in his hands until it was no bigger than a belt, and I thought of the way my mother used to stand in front of the closet she shared with my father, coldly fingering the clothes she bought off-season in bargain basements. A belt, she’d say. If I just had one good belt to tie this outfit together … There was a broom closet off the kitchen, where a lightbulb hung over a metal chair, and when my mother was disgusted with all of us she’d retreat to that paneled box and browse through stacks of old Vogues with a cold, unblinking eye.

  ‘You will be reporting this incident?’ the manager said anxiously.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Please don’t worry about it. The clothes wouldn’t fit me now anyway. I lost some weight in the hospital.’

  He broke into a radiant smile. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said. ‘Anyone this could see. You have great kindness. My wife, my children, will all have gratefulness – this job only has been in my possession for several months.’ He looked over at Dr Yu and his face darkened again. ‘But your friend …’

  ‘Why would she care?’ I asked. He dropped his eyes and I looked at him sharply. ‘Did you call Lou?’ I said. ‘Did you tell him Dr Yu was here with me?’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ he said in dismay. ‘You guide, he alerts himself. I am complete discreetness.’

  He wrung his hands and apologized again and then he left, murmuring a few words to Dr Yu as he passed her. The day was unraveling around me faster than I could knit it up again. My clothes were destroyed, my hair was gone, Dr Yu had been insulted; a suitcase I didn’t recognize sat next to Walter’s brown leather bag, which we had bought together in Vermont. Walter’s friends talked on and on and didn’t seem to understand that they should go. Katherine had somehow turned the conversation to her family’s long involvement with China.

  ‘My grandfather made a famous translation of the Book of Changes,’ she told Dr Yu. ‘And he translated many of the works of Li Po and the other Tang poets. And also many of the classics of Chinese traditional medicine – he used to drive my grandmother crazy, cooking up potions in the kitchen of their summer home. Boiled licorice root and scallions, dried lotus buds and dogwood and orange peel and ginger …’ She laughed musically. ‘He was such a crank,’ she said fondly. ‘Yin and yang, hot and cold, wet and dry – he had arthritis. What he needed was an aspirin. And then my father studied Chinese history – his specialty was the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. And two of my uncles – my family has been involved with China for years, but none of them ever made it here. I’m the first.’

  She said a few phrases in Mandarin, with an accent so pure that I felt a pang of jealousy. Dr Yu complimented her on her pronunciation.

  ‘My father taught me a little,’ Katherine said modestly, her face lit up with pleasure. ‘But you know, it’s the strangest thing – since we got here, I’ve discovered that I can’t understand what anyone’s saying. I can’t seem to distinguish any words. Everyone speaks so fast, and with such an accent – all I can hear is noise.’

  ‘Well,’ Dr Yu said, ‘no doubt we sound different than your family who taught you. Since they learned only from books, since they never came here …’

  Everyone paused at the same time. ‘The laundry destroyed my clothes,’ I announced.

  Quentin smiled and moved his sneakered foot away from Katherine’s brown pump. ‘We know,’ he said. ‘The manager was just telling us when you walked in.’

  Katherine frowned and tapped Quentin on the arm, and in that instant I thought I understood the tension in the room. Katherine and Quentin must be sleeping together, or they had, or they would – they had that slyness about them, and that set of shared gestures. I moved toward Walter. I had so much to say to him – everything that had happened while he was away, everything I’d thought about. All our history, which suddenly seemed worth preserving. ‘Dr Yu and her husband took such good care of me,’ I said. ‘I had this fever …’

  Walter smiled and nodded but made no move to touch me. ‘I heard,’ he said. ‘I called the hospital every day.’ He turned toward Dr Yu and said, ‘Really – I’m so grateful for your help.’ Katherine dug in the suitcase I didn’t recognize and passed a small package to Walter, which he offered to Dr Yu. ‘Please accept this token of my thanks,’ he said.

  Dr Yu moved forward reluctantly. ‘There is no need,’ she said. ‘Your wife has been my close friend.’

  ‘Please,’ Walter said. I was proud of him then, proud of his thoughtfulness. I prayed that he’d brought something useful and good – a cassette player, perhaps, or even something for Dr Yu’s lab, a pH meter or a micropipette.

  Dr Yu unwrapped the package slowly. Inside lay a black silk Qing-style jacket, with a mandarin collar closed by a red frog. The silk was coarse, the embroidery rough; the style was a crude imitation of an American’s idea of imperial elegance. I had seen work like this at home, in shops that aped Uncle Owen’s Oriental taste but couldn’t tell good work from bad. Tired peddlers had hawked trays of these jackets to us at every tourist spot I’d been dragged to my first week.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dr Yu said slowly. ‘That is most kind.’

  ‘Try it on,’ Katherine said. Her voice was high and clipped. Cream? I could imagine her saying. Weak or strong? I saw her pouring at a proper tea, ironing sheets and storing them with lavender sachets. Her shoes were excellent, sturdy and expensive.

  Dr Yu put the jacket on. The sleeves hung four inches below her fingers, and a chain of small white holes dotted the shoulder seam.

  ‘A little big,’ Katherine said brightly. ‘But surely the sleeves can be hemmed. Any good seamstress …’

  Dr Yu and I looked at each other, trying to shut out Katherine’s voice. But Katherine seemed compelled to tell us how the jacket had been bought.

  ‘Xian,’ she said. ‘What a place. Our hosts took us to the tomb of Qin Shihuang – you know the famous emperor? The one who built the Great Wall and buried all the pottery armies around him?’

  Dr Yu and I nodded politely. Everyone had heard of the Xian tombs. Even us.

  ‘After we left the museum we got funneled through this market set up outside the exit. Two rows of stalls, us forced down the middle …’ She smiled at Walter and Walter smiled back. Quentin made a face at his shoes. ‘Wasn’t it amazing?’ she said.

  ‘It was something,’ Walter agreed. He wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘Sort of third-world,’ Katherine said. ‘We didn’t expect it after the majesty of the tombs. These little boys kept plucking our sleeves and saying, “Hello, hello, lady hello, you buy?” and then pulling us over to their parents’ stalls.
And then they had all this stuff, pottery replicas of the buried soldiers and horses, and lapel pins and embroidered runners and carved jade and shoulder bags. Some people were selling fruit, and someone had home-made Popsicles – instant hepatitis, if you ask me – and a few people had some silk, and they were willing to bargain.’

  Dr Yu had taken the jacket off and was rolling a corner of it between her fingers. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘They would bargain. It’s a poor city.’

  My chest was hurting again and so was my head. I wanted Katherine to shut up, get out of my room, get out of my life. She went on talking.

  ‘So anyway,’ she said, ‘Walter found this jacket and said it was just the thing for you, and so we bought it. And I bought one for myself, and then when we turned around we found Quentin surrounded by all these kids trying to sell him clay animals. He bought this whole flock before we could stop him. And then he had to leave them at the hotel because our baggage was overweight, which was too bad, really – they would have looked stunning on a mantelpiece.’

  ‘Oh, stunning,’ Quentin said sarcastically. On the mantelpiece in Uncle Owen’s house, the netsuke Dalton collected had been ranged in ordered rows.

  Katherine paused to catch her breath, but it was easy to tell she had more to say, that she might go on forever. She spoke with the enthusiasm of someone just escaped from a cloistered life, as if everything she’d seen had printed itself on her eyes but hadn’t made its way to her brain or her heart. I wondered how she’d lived her life.

  ‘You had an adventure,’ Dr Yu said softly. Quentin laughed.

  ‘We did,’ Katherine said. ‘A real adventure.’

  ‘You really saw the country.’

  ‘We really did.’

  ‘I hope you like the jacket,’ Walter said. ‘And if there’s ever anything I can do for you …’

  Rocky, I thought. I still hadn’t had a chance to look in my purse, which I’d spotted on the floor beneath the window ledge. ‘I am only glad I could help your wife,’ Dr Yu said. ‘And now I must go.’

  ‘So soon?’ Walter said. ‘Will we see you at the banquet?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She backed out of the room, her face closed to all of us, and I felt a sudden panic. We were due to leave the country in four days, and I didn’t know how we’d manage to see each other again.

  ‘What banquet?’ I said. I moved toward Dr Yu.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ said Quentin. ‘Most of the other scientists stayed here in the city while we went away. They’ve been visiting labs at the universities and seeing some of the sights. All of us, and all the Chinese scientists who participated in the conference, have been invited to a formal banquet at the Great Hall of the People.’

  ‘We rushed back to be here for it,’ Katherine said.

  Dr Yu looked at Walter. ‘You rushed back for Grace, I think.’

  ‘Of course,’ Walter said. And then he looked at me again, really looked for the first time, and he said, ‘Grace. What happened to your hair?’

  ‘We had to cut it,’ Dr Yu said shortly. ‘Her fever weakened it.’ She nodded in my direction. ‘I will see you tomorrow night. With luck.’

  I followed her into the hall and closed the door behind us, just in time to see her crush the silk jacket into a ragged ball. ‘That woman,’ she said fiercely. ‘These people – how can you live?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Please come tomorrow – I’ll wait for you, we don’t even have to sit with Walter. And I’ll talk to him about your son, I promise. Something will happen.’

  ‘Something will,’ she said. ‘I have no doubt at all about that.’

  THE SUMMER PALACE

  If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself …

  —Mao

  THAT NIGHT WAS one of those nights that never ends. Katherine didn’t leave us – on and on, all the way through dinner, she regaled me with tales of their traveling hardships. ‘Roaches,’ she said. ‘Worms in the dumplings. Spiders the size of birds. We got sidetracked to Kunming, four hundred miles out of our way, because some general had to go there …’ And even after dinner, when I thought Walter and I might go to our room and talk, he walked me upstairs, touched my hand lightly, and left me behind while he rejoined Katherine and Quentin in the bar. I leaned over the railing, unable to think of the words that might have made him stay, and I watched him move through the central atrium, past the jade plants, the goldfish pool, the reception desk. His feet were light; he was happy to leave me. During a pause at dinner, when Katherine had turned to Quentin with some remark, I’d asked Walter how he’d managed to forget Dr Yu’s name. ‘Oh,’ he’d said lightly. ‘Half the people here have names that sound alike.’

  I had told myself that that was Katherine talking, not him, but after he left me and went to the bar I was no longer sure. Our room was neat, sterile, sheltered; perfectly receptive and completely anonymous except for our few traces. Walter’s brown bag sat on the carpet like a dog. Some lecture notes from his trip were stacked on the table. Five pairs of my shoes – shoes were almost all I had left – stood neatly on the closet floor. My purse sat below the window ledge, where I had left it, and in Walter’s absence I dug through it and finally looked at Rocky’s drawings. My purse was enormous and the drawings were small and somehow they hadn’t been damaged; they were as beautiful as I’d remembered. Clean, precise, articulate, they spoke more about Rocky than anything he’d said, and I thought how, had the situation been different, Walter would have recognized their value instantly. But there was no way for Walter to see them without my explaining how I’d come by them.

  Walter had once made me love him by crying out in his dreams, but I knew less about his dreams now than I ever had. I knew his work dreams and only those, and those were only his ambitions. He knew even less about me. If I wanted anything different for us I’d have to tell him about Hank, and about the years after Mumu had died, and then what had happened between Randy and me and why I’d had that abortion; and if I told him all that and he told me anything real in return, then I’d have to tell him about Rocky. I could blame it on the fever, my state of mind, the strangeness of a dark night in China, but none of that would help; there was no avoiding the mess my confessions would make and no predicting which would upset him most. I liked the parts of my life to be separate: one vase on a white table. One rug on a smooth wooden floor. My parents separate from Uncle Owen, my husbands separate from my family; I liked that, I needed that, and I was pretty sure that Walter did too. No one could have lived with me for six years and known so little of my real life without wanting not to know. There were reasons Walter sat downstairs, ignoring me; reasons he’d married me and then allowed our lives to move on parallel tracks, side by side but never intersecting except in small daily ways. I knew other couples who lived as if a fistula connected their separate skins, but nothing oozed like that between Walter and me. We had rules in our household: we said what we meant, we meant what we said, if we didn’t say it, it wasn’t so. If I never admitted what I’d done, I hadn’t done it. If Walter never said what he wanted, he didn’t want.

  I fell asleep, missing the nightgown the laundry had shredded, missing Walter, and then I dreamed that I stood on the cliff at the gravel pit, overlooking the flat spot where Zillah and I had played. I dreamed that I jumped, not from the lower ledge where I’d broken my arm, but from the cliff itself, a hundred feet above the ground. I jumped and Zillah jumped beside me, and this time our arms did what we’d always wanted: we held them out and they turned into wings. Our arm bones shortened; our fingers lengthened enormously and splayed like spiders’ legs; smooth skin spanned our bones in flexible folds. We grew the wings of bats, the leathery membrane stretching back to our legs, and we sailed over the gravel pit in silent flight.

  There was an epidemic in Westfield the year Zillah and I got sick: she caught it from one of the children her grandmother care
d for each afternoon and I caught it from her. On the last day I saw her, she’d drooped over the village we were building from Popsicle sticks and said her throat was sore. I meant to visit her the next day, when she didn’t come to school, but by then my own throat was aching and burning and I had a headache so bad that the sunlight pained me. And so we were sick in our separate homes, which wasn’t entirely my fault: I was nine and the world was run by adults, and I had no power to force my mother to take Zillah in or to park myself at Zillah’s and refuse to leave.

  I had lain in my own bed, in my own room, and my mother took care of me as I’d known she would although we didn’t get along. I was bundled off to the doctor, given medicine, packed in ice; I was sponged and changed and bathed and fed, held and sung to and comforted. My father sat by me at night, when he came home from work. Mumu sat there in her wheelchair and stroked my hands. Our house was worn and we were pinched for money and my parents fought, but while the skin peeled off my hands and feet and the soft covering of my tongue dissolved, my parents suspended their differences and they took care of me. Meanwhile my fever soared so high that I heard Zillah’s voice, which is how I know the way her illness went.

  I hadn’t understood until then that Zillah’s life differed from mine. She was miserable at home and so was I, and I had thought our situations were equivalent. A false empathy: I imagined that my life was actually as bad as Zillah’s. As if there were no difference between having no food I liked and having no food; between having a grandmother in a wheelchair who lived with us because my father wished it and having a grandmother who lived there because she had no place else to go. I had been in the place where Zillah lived, but I hadn’t understood it, any more than I’d understood how relatively safe I was. Zillah lived in the corner of a long, low, concrete project, where the apartments were stacked like building blocks. The stairs ran up the outside and led to outdoor walkways, onto which the apartment doors opened. The door to Zillah’s place was red, and inside were uncurtained windows and cardboard boxes spilling clothes, scuffed linoleum and a green shag rug and a dark line across the wall where the children Zillah’s grandmother cared for – four of them, plus Zillah’s sister and two brothers – ran their fingers. Zillah had no father; her mother worked at the corrugated box plant and was never home. Her sister had a cleft lip that had never been repaired. All those children got sick, passing streptococci among themselves like toys, and there was no space in there for Zillah to rest, no person able to devote himself completely to her.