The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. I was just making conversation, just killing time. Somewhere during the previous night I’d given up trying to control anything around me, and now I was determined just to let what had to happen happen. The day was very warm, and I was tired.

  Quentin gestured toward Katherine and Walter. ‘What do you think?’

  I followed them with my eyes. They were looking at each other and talking so quickly their words must have overlapped. Some birds I didn’t recognize darted and swooped around them – swallows, maybe, something sharp-winged and fast. Katherine was shorter than Walter but much taller than me, which allowed her to look him easily in the face. And she was younger than Walter but not so young as me, and she knew Walter’s work very well. She’d read his papers. She’d done similar experiments. She’d studied the effects of acid rain on the northern lakes of England in much the same way Walter had studied the lakes at home, and of course they had lots to talk about. Of course Walter was completely absorbed with her.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I told Quentin. I steered him toward the shade. ‘Walter’s always like this when he’s around someone who shares his work. He thinks it’s this big conquest for him to capture their minds. He likes to pick their brains, and share his. That’s all.’

  Quentin took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his face. ‘Whatever you say. Do you suppose there’s someplace here we could get a drink?’

  ‘At the end of this walkway,’ I said. ‘I think there’s a restaurant.’

  ‘If we make it that far,’ he said. He rolled his sleeves above his elbow and I loosened the collar of my blouse.

  ‘I thought something was going on between you and Katherine,’ I continued.

  He laughed then, loud and long. ‘She’s ten years older than me,’ he said. ‘And anyway – Jesus.’

  ‘Walter’s twelve years older than me.’

  ‘So what’s your point? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a badly matched couple.’

  His voice was sour, and suddenly I was tired of him. Watching, judging, grading, his mouth always set as if he’d bitten something bitter. He was as fair-skinned as I was but twice as frail, the skin on the back of his hands already dotted with heat rash. I couldn’t imagine how he’d survived his tour of the southern cities. A woman holding a tray full of lukewarm juice in paper containers approached us, and Quentin stopped to examine her wares. ‘Rose hips, apple, orange,’ he read. The labels were printed in English as well as Chinese. ‘Rose hips? Do you have any ice? Do you have a straw?’

  I left him to his negotiations and strode away, ignoring the pain in my feet, and a few minutes later I came around a bend and found Katherine and Walter sitting on a marble bench, much as I had sat with James Li just a few hours ago. I reminded myself that Walter always talked endlessly to anyone who flattered him; that James Li and I had also talked and smiled and it had meant nothing. The sun was so bright, the reflection off the lake so brilliant, that Walter’s head seemed almost black against the background of the water.

  I sat down on the bench across from them and stripped off my shoes and then pretended to admire the view. Katherine and Walter went on talking, but they weren’t discussing their work.

  ‘Remember when we first saw the White Swan Hotel?’ Katherine said. ‘Like a piece of home, right there?’

  ‘We were so hot,’ Walter said. ‘And then all that glass and white concrete …’

  ‘And air-conditioning,’ Katherine said.

  ‘And iced drinks,’ Walter replied.

  They knew I was there; they smiled at me. But their conversation excluded me completely, and when they kept on talking I felt a stab in my temples that might have been jealousy. The memories they were sharing were supposed to have been mine; if I hadn’t been sick I would have gone on that trip. I listened hungrily, my eyes half-closed against the glare, and I tried to imagine what they’d seen.

  ‘That ferry,’ Katherine said, and they both laughed.

  ‘What ferry?’ I said. I tried to imagine it – low, with a roof and open sides, square and steel-floored and crowded. Or maybe it was small and made of wood, with glassed-in sides.

  They stopped laughing. Walter composed his face and said, ‘I’m sorry, Grace – you don’t even know what we’re talking about. This was in Canton. We split from our guide for the afternoon and went wandering around on our own. And it was ninety-five degrees out, and we got lost …’

  ‘You and Katherine and Quentin?’ I said. I struggled to focus on what he was saying, but I was distracted. By half closing my eyes, half dreaming, I could see simultaneously all the palaces that had occupied these grounds. The palace the Emperor Qianlong had built and the ruins left after the Opium Wars, the Empress Cixi’s renovation and the rubble left after the Boxer Rebellion, the new renovation that Uncle Owen had seen, and the new destruction and the even newer repairs …

  ‘Me and Katherine,’ Walter said. ‘Quentin stayed in. He had diarrhea from something he’d eaten in Shanghai.’ I turned my head and saw Quentin in the distance, moving slowly from one patch of shade to the next. ‘Katherine and I had been walking along the river,’ Walter continued. ‘She found a bridge over to Shamian Island. And then we found this amazing hotel, so we went in and had lunch.’

  ‘A BLT,’ Katherine said. ‘With ginger ale. And ice cubes.’

  There was real pleasure in her voice, and I focused on her face. Good teeth, straight nose, light brown hair, and wispy eyebrows. The kind of face that looked well outdoors. Her hands were small and sinewy. ‘You must be very homesick,’ I said.

  ‘The food here,’ Katherine began, and then she shook her head and smiled. ‘The sights have been wonderful, but the food …’

  ‘That lunch was great,’ Walter said, as if I’d questioned it. ‘After lunch we found this ferry across the river and we took it just to be adventurous. There was this amazing market on the other side, all these animals being sold for food – snakes and eels and frogs and sparrows. Snipe, even. Monkeys. Owls.’

  ‘Live?’ I said. Uncle Owen had told me that Cantonese restaurants were famous for their exotic dishes. Once, when he’d been visiting our family, he and my father had roasted a saddle of venison from a deer a friend of my father’s had shot. The meat had been dark and savory and strange, and the two men had made a pungent sauce for it.

  ‘Live,’ Katherine said. ‘It was so outrageous. But we did what we could.’

  ‘It was Katherine’s idea,’ Walter said. ‘We bought as many of the birds as we could, and as soon as we’d paid for them we let them go.’

  ‘Right there,’ Katherine said. ‘Right in front of those cruel men. Selling wildlife like that – who ever heard of such a thing?’

  ‘It’s part of their culture,’ I said mildly. ‘They’ve always eaten those animals.’ Uncle Owen had eaten snake there, and wildcat and bear and more.

  ‘What culture?’ Walter said, and then he looked around the grounds when I made a face. ‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘All this, I know it goes back thousands of years – but where’s the culture now? They’re thirty years behind us, and they’re destroying their own environment, killing off everything but the people.’

  Katherine nodded in agreement. ‘In the fifties, they tried to kill all the songbirds here,’ she said. ‘They thought the birds were eating too much grain. And I’ve heard they kill dogs and cats in the cities for food.’

  That seemed to be what she disliked about China – not the politics, not the bureaucracy or the legacy of the blood years or the reappearance of paupers and thieves, but a lack of respect for wildlife and pets. ‘You probably ate some during your trip,’ I said. ‘And didn’t even know it. My great-uncle ate cat here – he said it tasted like chicken.’

  She paled and gripped her thigh with her hand. She was as thin as Walter, and their thighs on the bench looked identically long and bony. A shadow fell across my lap and I looked up to find Quentin hovering over us, the paper container that had held his drink
suspended from one hand. He was damp all over and his lips were pale.

  ‘Aren’t you all hot?’ he said. ‘It’s so hot here, there’s no breeze …’ He sat down heavily next to me. A limnologist, I remembered. At home in cool lakes. Here he was like a fish on the shoreline, hot and scalded and sick.

  ‘We were telling Grace about the wild animal market,’ Katherine said. ‘In Canton.’

  ‘The great liberation,’ Quentin said. ‘The rescue of oppressed wildlife by the noble foreigners.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Walter said. ‘We did the right thing.’

  ‘The world’s staunchest cultural imperialist.’ Quentin crossed his ankles and stared over the lake for a minute. ‘I should have brought sunglasses,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe I forgot.’

  ‘I saw a kid selling some,’ I said. ‘Back at the east gate.’

  Quentin ignored me and looked at Walter. ‘Did you tell her about the project yet?’

  Katherine reddened and Walter shifted uneasily. ‘Not yet,’ Walter said.

  Quentin turned to me. ‘Katherine’s going to spend her sabbatical in Massachusetts,’ he said. ‘In Massachusetts, at your university. Walter’s department, actually. Walter’s lab.’

  The heat had made him mean. Walter glared at Quentin and folded his arms and Quentin copied the gesture. ‘It’s not for certain yet,’ Walter said.

  ‘Your house,’ Quentin continued. ‘That extra room over your garage – Walter says Katherine might as well stay there, she’ll be perfectly comfortable.’

  My old room, the place where I’d first holed up when I returned to Massachusetts. The sloping walls, the neat bed, the desk in front of the window; I wondered how my life would have gone if I’d stuck to that room, treated it as shelter and nothing more. I couldn’t imagine Katherine there.

  Katherine was very pink by then, but Walter stood his ground. ‘We want to do some work together,’ he said, and then he took a swipe at me – intended? unconscious? – while I was trying to picture them dissecting fish together in a trailer by the lake. ‘Since I can’t finish the project at the swamp,’ he continued. ‘I was telling Katherine what happened there, how things fell apart right in the middle of our work, and she said I ought to put the research team back together and go to the Quabbin instead. It’s a great idea – I don’t know why I didn’t see it. A better model, more refined than the first one, a follow-up study looking at the changes over the last ten years … we got so excited planning it that Katherine volunteered to help.’

  Something clicked into place in my brain, the way a jigsaw puzzle piece which has always appeared to belong to a mountain suddenly reveals itself as part of a cloud. Everything is related to everything else, Zillah said; Walter’s first law of ecology.

  ‘Isn’t that nice,’ Quentin said. ‘That she’s willing to help?’

  ‘She has a huge grant,’ Walter said. ‘We can use the Quabbin data for a comparative study with her work in Sheffield.’

  An old man in a blue coat passed by, carrying a duffle bag and smoking a long pipe. He wore a small white cap and walked as if he’d come from the sea or was heading back to it. Two boys in miniature green army outfits watched me and giggled when I caught them at it. Someone had carved dragons over all the walls and pillars; someone else had pruned the trees for decades into gnarled and amazing shapes, so there was something to look at in every direction. Out on the lake three small boats floated, no bigger from this distance than the rafts James Li had floated on the garden pond.

  ‘I was thinking we could stay here,’ I said to Walter quietly. I already knew what he’d say, but I wanted the words out in the open. ‘You could teach at one of the universities, and I could tutor people in English, and we could live in one of the dormitories.’

  ‘Here?’ Walter said. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘I hate it here,’ he told me. ‘I mean, it’s interesting for a few weeks, but all I want right now is home.’

  ‘Hot water,’ Quentin said helpfully. ‘Air-conditioning. Decent restaurants.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Walter said. ‘And I’m not ashamed to admit it.’

  ‘I love it here,’ I said.

  Katherine laughed nervously and Walter made a disgusted face.

  ‘You think you do,’ he said. ‘Because you don’t understand it. You don’t see one real thing that’s going on here. All you see are your fantasies.’

  That was Walter; full missionary position. I shrugged and rose and headed down the long smooth path, leaving him and the others behind as I tried to imagine China the way Walter did, as it might be. Just a big dirty country. Just a lot of people. Snarled up, unworkable; not a romance, not a story, not a myth. Maybe Walter was right and all I saw here were my dreams. Above me the glazed tiles of the Temple of the Sea of Wisdom glittered in the sun. I made a palace of dreams, Dr Yu had said to me. What I wish for. What I want. What I hope. Everyone had one; maybe everyone had two, the way we had two ears, two eyes, two lungs, two hands, a pair of kidneys, and a pair of feet. One palace for the past and one for the dreams to come. I felt the way I once had in Massachusetts – as if my skin had grown suddenly permeable, as if the world were leaking in.

  Walter saw a sea of things too broken to fix and I saw, below me, hundreds of people near the edge of the lake, enjoying the sun and the gentle breeze and dreaming their own dreams. I leaned against a carved stone lion and emptied my mind. Listen, Zillah said. You can hear if you try.

  My boy has red cheeks and fat arms.

  Four babies sit at my feet.

  In a field green with new wheat, two rocks sit.

  From our houseboat, floating down the river, we hear tigers call.

  If only that man would move his arm.

  If only I had a new bike.

  He lifts his hand, which is creased along the back, and he takes my chin in his warm fingers.

  That woman by the water there, beneath her clothes her skin may be like ivory.

  Suppose I had just two young pigs.

  I walk into the office and I am firm, I am perfectly clear, I do not apologize.

  In the old garden, the stones shot straight from the earth.

  The trees might talk.

  I opened my eyes. Maybe I’d heard the people below me; maybe I’d only guessed. Somewhere my mother dreamed of being rich, not understanding that no amount of money would ever fix her life. My father dreamed of small rare stamps, a face printed upside down or a boat with its sails reversed. My brother dreamed that his children might be wholly unlike him and that his wife had turned into a model. My mother-in-law dreamed of her son and my father-in-law dreamed of peas. James Li floated rafts on a puddle and dreamed of his lost love. Rocky dreamed of shopping malls and unrationed pork, his father dreamed he could live his life again, and Dr Yu dreamed that her sister and parents were still alive, that her students had not been lost, that her lab gleamed with new equipment … for a minute, just a minute, I heard her voice in the hospital, telling me the story of her life.

  I walked down to the marble pleasure boat the Dowager Empress had bought with the money meant for the Imperial Navy, and as I did I saw the first house I’d bought with Uncle Owen’s money. Which was the more useless purchase? Zillah said. Which more cruel?

  I couldn’t answer her. The Dowager Empress had had an answer for the people who criticized her purchase: she told them she had used the money for shipbuilding, and she invited them to visit her boat. I had never asked Walter to visit my first house. He’d come twice, uninvited, only to stand silently in the lacquer-red dining room, and only now did I wonder what he’d thought. Perhaps he’d looked at my careful arrangements of screens, chairs, and porcelains, and had seen, not a woman combining and recombining objects into a pleasing pattern, but a woman getting ready to leave.

  In the distance I saw Walter standing near his bench, waving his left arm at me in broad, slow strokes. Years ago, in Fargo, he’d once waved across space like that to me
. He and his father had gone for a walk and were returning across the rutted fields; from the window above the kitchen sink I’d seen them emerge from the trees and move our way. The wind caught at their jackets and puffed their sleeves. Walter had turned toward Ray and then Ray had taken a little twisting step and sunk to his knees, as if he wanted to demonstrate to Walter some property of the soil. Walter had turned toward the window where I stood and had thrown his left arm up in the air, moving it slowly back and forth.

  I had waved back, and then Walter had cupped his right hand around his mouth and shouted something. I’d thrown open the window. ‘What?’ I’d called. I couldn’t understand him. ‘What?’

  His left arm beat at the air: up, down, up. ‘Geese!’ he’d cried. And when I’d raised my eyes to the sky above him, I’d seen an enormous flock of geese in the air, winging their way south.

  ‘Geese!’ he’d shouted again.

  ‘Wonderful!’ I’d called back, touched that he’d thought to point them out to me. I’d shut the window and gone to find my mother-in-law, meaning to show her the spectacle, but Lenore was folding sheets in the basement and I got caught up in helping her, left corner brought to right, left brought up again, the two of us moving together for the final folds. By the time we returned to the kitchen, Walter had already led Ray inside. Ray was ashen-faced, leaning on Walter’s arm.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  Walter packed crushed ice in a towel and then wrapped it around Ray’s leg. ‘His knee,’ Walter said furiously. ‘He twisted his knee out there. Couldn’t you hear me calling you?’

  I had heard him, but I’d misunderstood him completely; I couldn’t be sure what he was saying now. His arm still waved at me, broad and slow and strong. He cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted.

  ‘Grace!’ I heard this time. ‘Come on! We have to get back!’ Perfectly clear, as clear as Zillah’s voice.

  THE PALACE OF DREAMS

  A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection …