The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  —Mao

  THE SKY BEGAN to darken and the kites a pair of children flew seemed to come alive over Tiananmen Square as the buses drove us in for our final banquet. One, two, three small buses, soft-seated and gray-windowed, nothing like the public bus I’d ridden with Dr Yu. People stared into the windows at us. We were a sight, a spectacle, all of us dressed in our best clothes and giddy because we were going home. I could taste the relief in the air.

  ‘Two days,’ I heard the scientists say again and again. Two days. They were making plans: what they would do, eat, buy first. The Belgians stuck close to the Belgians, the French to the French. The Australians couldn’t be separated from each other. Two and a half weeks of traveling, listening to talks, visiting factories and power plants, eating unfamiliar food; all they could think about was home. They poured up the forbidding steps of the Great Hall of the People, chattering in a dozen languages and unaware of the quiet Chinese who climbed slowly beside them.

  I walked up the steps alone. Quentin had abandoned me for James Li, which I should have seen coming but hadn’t. James had been waiting in the hotel lobby when we returned from the Summer Palace, and as we entered he’d cried ‘Tinnie!’ and then thrown himself into Quentin’s arms like a long-lost brother, while I stood frozen in surprise.

  ‘Tinnie?’ Walter had said. ‘Tinnie?’ The name didn’t seem to fit the serious scientist beside us.

  ‘We were college roommates,’ Quentin said, and Walter appeared to accept that. I don’t believe he saw the gentle touch James gave Quentin, but I did and I felt a moment’s panic as Quentin introduced us all around. James shook my hand as if we’d never met before. ‘Mrs Hoffmeier,’ he said, rolling the name on his tongue. He gave me a small, conspiratorial smile.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said lamely. I’d told him so much, thinking we’d never meet again, and now I worried that he’d tell Quentin, who might tell Katherine, who would surely tell Walter. But James touched my arm lightly before he and Quentin strolled off together, and his touch told me my secrets were safe; he had secrets of his own for me to keep. Katherine stayed behind with me and Walter, and later, as we dressed for the banquet, Walter paused every few minutes to add something to the list growing on a piece of hotel stationery. The list was headed ‘Quabbin Retrospective: A Comparison.’ He was gone.

  Now they hung behind me two by two, James and Quentin, Katherine and Walter, and all four of them ignored me as I greeted Dr Yu, who was waiting for me on those wide steps. She stood perfectly still, her hands clasped quietly at her waist. She wore the same clothes she’d worn the night we first met: gray skirt, dove-colored silk blouse, black shoes, pearls in her earlobes. The party-goers streamed past her quiet figure.

  ‘You came,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad.’

  James and Quentin and Katherine and Walter passed us without a word, completely preoccupied. Dr Yu nodded. ‘Of course I did.’ She watched me watching the others, and she said, ‘This is interesting. They have been like this all day?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said. Their heads seemed magnetized, locking the couples eye to eye.

  ‘The new young man – he is overseas Chinese?’

  ‘Born in New Jersey,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘I imagine,’ she said. She followed James Li with her eyes. ‘Look at his clothes – how well he wears them, how nice they are. His shoes, his haircut – all very good. He looks refined. He looks like Zaofan would look, if Zaofan got away.’ She paused for a minute and watched as James bent toward Quentin. ‘How is it these two men are so friendly?’

  ‘They’re very old friends,’ I said. ‘They went to school together.’

  She raised her eyebrows but said nothing more. We passed through the massive doors and into the reception hall, where we stood with several hundred people amidst the huge paintings and the crystal chandeliers and the golden moldings. A small man in a gray suit shepherded us toward another pair of doors at the room’s far end. He barked something in a high voice, and then he threw open the doors into the banquet hall. The hall stretched on forever, dotted with round tables covered by crisp white cloths. Rows of white-coated, white-gloved waiters guarded the tables and stood rigid and unsmiling.

  The small man came over to Walter as we stepped inside. ‘Dr Hoffmeier?’ he said. Walter nodded and the man continued. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You, also other honored guests in your party, please to seat yourselves at one of these six front tables. For distinguished conference members.’

  Walter couldn’t have been surprised – he’d organized much of the conference, given one of the key lectures, jetted about the country on a speaking tour. But still he flushed pink with pleasure. I sat next to Dr Yu and Quentin sat next to me, and then came James Li and then Walter and then Katherine. The tables sat eight, and I watched the small man puzzle over how to fill our empty seats. As the scientists entered the hall he’d been separating them into two streams, Chinese and foreign, so he could recombine them properly: four or five foreigners at each table, three or four Chinese. An equal balance, very diplomatic, but I could tell he wasn’t sure how to count Dr Yu and James Li. Finally he sent over a pair of blue-suited men who introduced themselves as Dr Wu and Dr Shen. They greeted Walter and Katherine and Quentin and me in English, and then they murmured to Dr Yu in their soft Mandarin. When they tried the same on James, James blushed.

  ‘My apologies,’ he said in English. ‘I was born in America, and I speak only English and my parents’ dialect. Cantonese. I can’t speak the northern tongue.’

  The two men looked at each other. ‘Not at all?’ Dr Shen said. His English was correct but very heavily accented, and I watched as Walter’s face closed to him and Katherine’s followed.

  ‘Not at all,’ James said. ‘But of course I can read.’ As if to prove himself, he plucked the handwritten menu from the lazy Susan and slowly began to translate it for us. ‘Winter melon soup,’ he said, struggling over the characters. ‘Crisp skin fish.’ No one had the heart to point out the English version written on the back.

  Somehow that scene set the tone for the rest of the meal. Every attempt at a general conversation seemed to fail and silences fell after every general observation. We broke into pairs, probably doomed to that from the start by what was going on among half the table. James talked to Quentin in a low voice, describing how strange this visit had been for him. ‘My parents’ country,’ I could hear him say. ‘But it’s not mine at all, although of course it is – but it isn’t, really, my parents fled during the revolution …’ Walter described Fargo to Katherine, lingering long on his hometown’s quiet charms, and Katherine listened happily and agreed with him. ‘I love traveling in the States,’ she said. ‘Everything’s so wide open, so big – it’s the only place to be for a biologist. When I think of what I could do there …’ Dr Wu and Dr Shen talked to each other and also to our waiter, who filled our glasses with beer and sweet pink wine and pressed plates of savory appetizers on us. Dr Yu talked to me.

  In front of us were several tables of high-ranking Chinese scientists and Party leaders, and Dr Yu pointed some of them out to me. ‘President of Beijing University,’ she murmured. ‘President of Qinghua, vice president of Chinese Association for Science and Technology, head of Chinese Academy of Sciences – and there, over there to the left, those are scientists visiting from Shanghai for special study.’

  ‘It’s so amazing,’ I said. ‘For me to be here at this …’

  One of the scientists proposed a toast, and then another. The waiter refilled our glasses. Dr Yu said, ‘It is amazing for me also, to be here.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Very much,’ she said. ‘I was here in Beijing when this building was made. In 1959 – everything still seemed so hopeful then. Our fathers both had escaped somehow the Anti-Rightist campaign in ’57, even though many scholars were punished then. And so Meng and I were able to go to university, as we wished, and help build socialism. Serve the country. Serve the people. When the huge
harvest of ’58 came, our classes were canceled and all of us, we went on buses to the countryside to help. We lived in tents. We did not mind the work. We sang, danced, gathered crops. We felt like part of our own country.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful,’ I said, reminded of my early days with Walter. Dr Yu’s voice had a wistfulness I could recognize.

  ‘It was,’ she said. ‘It was almost the last time like that we had. The weather changed the next year and then the famine began – you know about this? The three bad years?’

  I shook my head, although it didn’t sound completely unfamiliar. Her words came to me as if I’d heard them before, vaguely, in a dream.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘Only now do people begin to admit what happened then. Everyone was hungry. Everyone. In the city, here, we received one-half pound of grain each day, no salt, no fat, no meat, no vegetables. We ate bark we scraped from trees and boiled. Also leaves and wild herbs. In the countryside, where two of my brothers were, they ate ground-up cornstalks and sorghum stems and bark and roots.’

  She ate steadily as she spoke, her chopsticks moving quickly from the platters to her plate to her mouth. Our waiter brought dish after dish and kept our glasses full, and I concentrated all my attention on Dr Yu’s voice. Some of what she was saying sounded familiar to me.

  ‘You have known famine?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But sometimes I’ve eaten to fill up what seems empty, like you’d drink hot water to fill your stomach when you couldn’t get anything else. It’s just as useless, but that’s how I got this big.’

  ‘I must tell Meng,’ Dr Yu said thoughtfully. ‘You have eaten from sadness?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Meng thought you had thyroid disease.’

  We both smiled, and Katherine looked up at us before she returned her attention to Walter. Dr Yu pulled the red-cooked chicken over and then she continued talking. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Some people blamed the weather for this famine. Some blamed Mao and the Great Leap Forward. But still we were very idealistic, and we finished our studies and became married and thought, now our lives are really beginning. I was so proud to stay and teach at Qinghua, such a place of prestige. But of course, Qinghua – there was the start, practically, of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. So soon, almost immediately, the president of the university was overthrown, and then all rightist elements and bourgeois academic authorities and also those they call “escaped from the net,” which included me. Immediately my father was attacked because of his foreign training – they said he colluded with reactionaries, secret agents, and cultural imperialists. They said his body was saturated with evil germs of the bourgeoisie, as old meat is with disease.’

  She caught her breath and quickly ate some prawns in bean sauce. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I told you this part before. The Red Guards came, they locked him up, they paraded him around Shanghai, he died.’

  ‘I remember this,’ I said. ‘I remember some of this.’

  She hardly heard me. She snipped at her food with her chopsticks while she decided what to say next. She plucked and chewed and spoke again, swallowing quickly.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, then – once my father was taken, all was over for me. He has escaped the net, they said; he should have been reformed in the fifties. They will not make this mistake with me. I am contaminated. I am from a hopelessly bad class background. A dragon is born of a dragon, a phoenix is born of a phoenix, and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in the wall – that is what they told me. So I was guilty, Meng was guilty, our children – only two of them were born then, Zaofan and Zihong – they were guilty from birth because of us. Things were done to us, and to many others. Our jobs were taken.’

  ‘And your salaries,’ I said.

  ‘And we were struggled against daily,’ she said, nodding with approval. ‘In the lake at Beida, the beautiful lake you passed the night we met, floated new bodies every day of the suicides. People we knew. At Meng’s hospital, the doctors were made to work as orderlies, cleaning latrines and changing sheets, while the nurses and orderlies pretended to be doctors.’

  ‘And then you were sent to the country,’ I said. ‘For labor reform. And your sister was removed from the Ministry because of her connection to you, and the school where your mother taught was burned to the ground.’ I could have gone on; suddenly I felt like I knew the outlines of her life. Certain scenes lay before me as clearly as the ones Zillah had brought to my long sleep, and I knew then that I’d heard two voices and both of them were real.

  She looked at me. ‘You were listening,’ she said, and then she smiled broadly. ‘You heard me!’

  ‘I must have,’ I said. ‘But we don’t have to talk about this. I hate for you to be upset.’

  ‘I am not upset!’ she said. James and Quentin and Walter and Katherine all looked up then, but they were hypnotized, they were sheep, they were as stunned as if a spell had been cast on them. They were in love, two by two; if I hadn’t known it before I knew it then. Once I’d stood like that next to Jim, Page’s boyfriend, and had felt my feet moving his way as if my toes had minds of their own. Once, on a stony hillside, my leg had eased toward Hank’s thigh. And I had felt like that once toward Randy and maybe even toward Walter, and during none of those times had I been able to see the world around me. A child could have starved in front of me during those white flashes and I wouldn’t have noticed, any more than those two hypnotized couples noticed Dr Yu. They registered the click of her chopsticks, the rise in her voice, and then they forgot.

  ‘I am not upset,’ Dr Yu repeated. She leaned back in her chair and breathed deeply through her nose, and then she emptied her glass. ‘Of course I’m upset,’ she said, more quietly. ‘See what I mean? You think of these things from the past all the time, you press them to you as Meng does, living again and again each thing – of course you become upset. You become upset if the things remembered are bad, and you become distracted from your own life if the things you remember are good.’

  She paused. Dr Shen, who had been watching her curiously for some time, leaned over and spoke to her softly in Mandarin. She nodded rapidly and held her hand out to him, palm up. ‘It is fine,’ she said to him in English. ‘It is fine. She is my friend. She knows of my life.’

  Dr Shen looked at me gravely and inclined his head in a small bow. Dr Yu touched the back of my hand lightly with one finger.

  ‘All this I have told you,’ she said, ‘all this, is only to say that for me to be here in this building, as an honored guest, after all that has passed before … well. Only I wish Meng had come.’

  ‘You couldn’t bring him?’ I said.

  ‘I could – spouses were invited. But he swore he would never set foot inside these doors. And then I thought to bring Zaofan, but he laughed when I asked him. He asked me, should he come to this place where extraordinary incident occurred?’

  ‘Did you tell me about that?’ I asked. I struggled to fit the pieces I remembered into some larger shape. ‘I remember the trouble in the countryside, over the sweet potatoes. And the dazibao.’

  ‘This is something else,’ she said. ‘Zaofan was six when we were sent away, thirteen when we came back. He had almost no primary school, but somehow he had to pass the examinations for middle school, and somehow he did. But just when he started, Zhou Enlai died, and Zaofan participated with his classmates in the Qing Ming demonstrations. And – probably you know this, probably you read about this in your papers at home. It was just ten years ago.’

  ‘I know about Qing Ming,’ I said. ‘A little. When my Uncle Owen was here, he used to go with his friends to sweep the graves of their ancestors. Afterwards, they had big parties to celebrate the spring.’

  She nodded. ‘This was the same celebration. You remember pictures from 1976, hundreds of thousands of people filling the square outside this building?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Sort of,’ she repeate
d. ‘A great sadness occurred when Zhou died, and then anger when the government made no official mourning for him. People my age, our lives had just been returned to us and we were too timid, still, to do anything. But young people, students especially, they made their own mourning. A bad article against Zhou appeared in the Shanghai newspapers, and this caused great demonstrations. People marched outside here, bringing wreaths and poems honoring Zhou, and some people pasted these poems to the Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes in the square. Also someone made a poem comparing Mao to the Emperor Qin Shihuang. The one Katherine visited the tomb for, in Xian.’

  ‘I thought he was a hero,’ I said.

  She made a face. ‘Some hero. He made an empire, perhaps, united many peoples and guarded empire’s borders. But also he ordered all books burned and many scholars killed. So to say this, to say what Mao did during the blood years is like what the Qin Emperor did – well, this is a strong thing.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘What you would expect. By the second night of the demonstrations, most people had left, but the wreaths stayed, rows and rows of them. Late in the night, trucks from the government came and stole all the wreaths away, against tradition. This was seen by some, and at dawn people poured back into the square. Many were students from the middle schools, among them Zaofan. They asked that the wreaths be replaced, and when no answer came they grew angry. Several cars were burned. One building was set on fire. Foreign journalists, their films were taken.’

  ‘A riot?’ I said.

  ‘A small one. That evening, the mayor of Beijing stood on the steps to this building and he called out, “Go home! All you boys and girls, you go home!” His voice came out of the loudspeakers on the lampposts in the square. Some boys and girls went home and some stayed, Zaofan included. Later they turned on all the floodlights and then the militia came with clubs and surrounded the students and beat them. They arrested many and hurt some, and a few were killed. Zaofan was arrested, and even though he was released the next day, this went in his file along with notes about how we, his parents, had undergone labor reform, and also the sweet potato incident when we were in the country. So of course when he applied to art institute, he could not get in.’