The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  She brushed the tablecloth with the tips of her fingers. ‘Always, this will be with him,’ she said. ‘The rehabilitation committee excused him after Mao died and the Gang of Four fell, and also they restored my job and Meng’s and returned back salary for our lost years. But always the stain has remained for all of us. Always, these times repeat.’

  As the meal wound down, we drank many toasts. We drank to the heroes of the revolution, to the victories of the anti-imperialist wars, to Sino-American cooperation and the continued friendship of our peoples. We drank to the increased joint production of high-technology goods, to the weather, to the various dignitaries, and to some of the prominent scientists. Once, even, we drank to Walter, and Walter trembled with pleasure when a department chairman from one of the universities praised him for organizing the conference so well. When Walter sat down after toasting his hosts in return, he bent toward Katherine and squeezed her hand.

  His smile was as clear as a poster, the light in his eyes as strong and sharp as the mao-tai the waiters had poured for the toasts. I felt like I held Dr Yu’s life in my head, a small glowing ball buried deep in my brain, and I heard children singing in the streets and saw a ring of people with linked arms dancing. Two steps in place, one step forward; kick with the right leg, kick with the left. Music poured from the loudspeakers in the street. I saw myself in a concrete-walled classroom here, with a stack of sticky labels inscribed with the names of things. The language of things: chair, desk, window, wall, pencil, lamp, pen; me sticking labels on objects and the students repeating the words. It seemed like a pleasant dream, maybe even a possible one. I had no idea that Dr Yu had something else in mind for me.

  I rose unsteadily and walked over to Walter and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Outside,’ I said. ‘Now.’ The hand I placed on his shoulder felt dead, or his shoulder was dead, or whatever should have flowed between hand and shoulder was dead. I felt a wish just then, as strong as a kick in my chest, for a man with Walter’s brains and Randy’s wild anarchy and Rocky’s sweetness and Hank’s kind heart, and there was nothing I could do with that wish except to hold my ribs with my hands and know I wouldn’t die from the wanting.

  Walter followed me without any argument; maybe he knew from the look on my face that I was serious. He followed me through the endless rows of tables, along the red carpet, across the huge hall, out the massive doors to the dim broad steps overlooking the square. The square was empty except for a few people cutting the corners between one building and the next, and I saw it as it had been twenty years ago, filled with shouting Red Guards being blessed by Mao on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. I saw it ten years ago, filled with silent students laying wreaths at the base of the obelisk, and I saw Rocky there, still a teenager, risking himself while I burrowed deeper into all that hid me from my life. His mother had given me something precious, I saw, something I’d always lacked: a sense of context, a framework in which I could measure the choices I’d made.

  Walter started to say something, but I stopped him before he could. ‘Look,’ I told him. ‘Here’s the deal.’

  ‘What?’ he said. He touched my forehead with his fingers. ‘Are you sick again?’

  ‘You’re in love with her,’ I said. ‘Anyone could see it.’

  He managed to smile and look pained at the same time. He hugged himself, his hands cupping his elbows. ‘Grace,’ he said. ‘You don’t …’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘She makes me feel young again,’ he said – the most honest words he’d said to me in ages. ‘Happy. She makes me feel alive, like I can start over. Do anything. Be anyone. Sometimes I get so tired of who I am and what I do, and I wish I could go back to when I was just getting started.’

  I tried to listen to him the way I’d listened to Dr Yu, and when I did his words made me feel all we’d failed to build together. ‘There’s so much stuff I never told you,’ I said.

  ‘You think I don’t know? It used to hurt me, the way you’d never tell me anything.’

  We stared at each other for a minute. I’d tried not to take anything from my mother but I saw now that I had, without meaning to or even understanding what it was: I’d assumed her desperate gentility, which had made me see my family as crude, coarse, impossible; something to be left behind. And having done that, I’d learned to leave my other lives behind me like larval skins.

  I had never mentioned Zillah to Walter, or my old friends, Chuck and Mark. I had never let Walter see more of my family than the bare outlines, the hard facts: if I hadn’t been forced to on our first Christmas, I wouldn’t have let him see even that. It was my fault, at least in part, that he didn’t understand me. I’d given him nothing to work with but smoke.

  ‘I could tell you now,’ I said.

  ‘What would it change?’ he asked.

  We were silent for a minute, listening to the steady flow of traffic down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Cars and bicycles slipped past the gate to the Forbidden City, and I felt such a pull that I could hardly keep from leaping up and running toward the street and blending into the flow of bodies moving through the night. Let go of the house, I heard Zillah say, as clearly as if she were sitting in Walter’s place. Let go of the house, let go of the yard. Let go of the blue satin drapes, the old pine table, the Persian rugs; let go of the trellis planted with purple flowers and the white picket fence. Let it go.

  I crumpled my fingers into my palm and uncurled them slowly. All the things in our house and yard were Walter’s.

  ‘She keeps these notebooks,’ I heard Walter say shyly.

  ‘She binds them herself, in different fabrics, and she keeps notes about everything she sees in them. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  He looked good when he said that, he looked young. For a minute I thought of telling him that I could keep notebooks too, that I could work with him side by side at the Quabbin Reservoir. But it wouldn’t have been what either of us wanted. I let him go.

  That’s good, Zillah said.

  ‘So do you want to marry her?’ I asked. He ducked his head. ‘I might.’

  ‘So we’ll get a divorce. I’ll make things easy,’ I said. ‘And I won’t ask for anything, if you’ll do me a couple of favors.’

  He looked up expectantly. In the dim, kind light, he might have been thirty-four.

  ‘First,’ I said, ‘first, you pull all the strings you can and get me an extension on my visa and whatever other papers I need to stay here. I’m going to stay. I’m going to work here.’

  Walter looked at me blankly.

  ‘Second,’ I continued, ‘Dr Yu has a son who’s an excellent scientific illustrator. Hire him to work in your lab and take care of fixing his papers and getting him to the States.’

  ‘This part’s a joke,’ Walter said. ‘Right? This is the kid who dropped you off at the hotel, the one with the funny T-shirt? I don’t even know him.’

  ‘He’s nice,’ I said. ‘He’s bright and talented and his English is good, and he’s never going to be able to do what he wants here. He needs a break.’ I dug in my purse and came up with Rocky’s drawings, knowing as I showed them to Walter that I was giving Rocky away. But he’d never been mine; that night in the cab had only been a night in a cab, a dark place, two lost people. I needed to stay and he needed to go. ‘Look at these,’ I said to Walter. ‘No joke.’

  He squinted at the drawings, tilting them into the glow of the dim lamps. ‘These are good,’ he finally said. ‘These really are.’

  ‘So hire him. If you and Katherine go to work on the Quabbin again, you’ll need someone to do what I used to. Draw the dissections, make the graphs, do the illustrations for the papers. And Katherine’s not going to do that – she’s not like I used to be.’

  Walter took a deep breath. ‘I can try,’ he said. ‘I guess. Jesus, Grace. What are we doing?’ He wrapped a long arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.

  ‘What you want,’ I said. ‘What I want.’ I eased away. �
�You take Rocky and Katherine back home, and go back to your reservoir and write your papers. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘What will you live on?’

  ‘On what I earn. Dr Yu said she can get me some work teaching English. And if I need more money, I can always sell some of my things back home.’

  As soon as I said that, I knew I wouldn’t. Let go of the antiques, I heard Zillah say. All of them had come from China; Uncle Owen had just about stolen them. I’d leave them to Rocky, who could sell them or keep them as he saw fit.

  ‘So that’s it?’ Walter said. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, and I felt my lungs swell as if I’d filled them with air for the first time. I could let everything go. Let go of the swamp, Zillah said, and that was right too. That was the last thing, the largest thing, the mistakes I’d made there all that were tying me down.

  ‘You know,’ I said to Walter, ‘nothing ever happened between me and Hank. I was just being crazy.’

  He pulled his eyes back from the monument in front of us. ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I figured that out while you were sick. Once I got away from you, I was able to think over what had happened. Then I realized Hank had been telling me the truth, and that he never touched you. Did you make that up just to hurt me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was mad at you. At him too. I was mad at everybody.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘For whatever it was I did to make you that way.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said. ‘For everything.’

  Dr Yu opened the door and came down the steps to us. ‘The banquet is over,’ she said gently. ‘They are making the final toasts. They would like to toast Dr Hoff-er-meierr one last time.’

  Walter stood and looked at me before he left. I gave him a little push, the last time I’d ever touch him, and then I watched as he galloped up the steps two at a time.

  ‘You are all right?’ Dr Yu said.

  ‘Better than that. I’m staying. He’s going. He’s taking Katherine home. And he’s taking Rocky – Zaofan – with him. He’s going to give him a job.’

  Dr Yu smiled and pressed her hand to her chest. ‘This is true?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Will you work for me?’ she said. ‘My laboratory assistant is leaving, and I would like for you to have her job. Will you accept?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Then we have much to celebrate. Do you dance?’

  ‘I love to dance,’ I said.

  Across Tiananmen Square, down one of the large avenues and past two others, through a maze of hutongs and a forest of small buildings, was the cellar Dr Yu had in mind. Inside the unmarked door was a white room with a low ceiling and an old mirror ball and a scattering of faded paper decorations on the walls. One step up from the floor, on a wooden platform, a small band played a mixture of American show tunes, Chinese folk songs, and pop music imported from Hong Kong. Rows of wooden chairs stood before the platform, but all of them were empty; some of the guests stood against the walls but most of them moved gravely across the floor, dancing dances I hadn’t seen in years. Not the Loyalty Dance, not the Planting Dance, but the waltz, the foxtrot, the mambo, the rumba, the conga. Dances Uncle Owen had once taught me. Perhaps he’d learned them here, in those strained times just before Liberation. Or perhaps he’d taught some of these people, who waltzed gracefully past a sign on the wall that read:

  Dream Palace

  For Dancing.

  Band Tonight.

  The crowd absorbed us instantly as we walked in. People stared at me, at my clothes and my hair and my size, but their stares weren’t hostile and they drew closer to me as Dr Yu touched my arm and murmured, ‘Pengyou.’ Friend. Then everyone wanted to dance with me. The first woman who propelled me around the room said my hair was remarkable; several other people said they wanted to practice their English with me. I danced with a little boy, with men old and young, with girls and with women my own age, because that’s the way things were done in that room: everyone danced with everyone. I traded my scarf for a carved wooden comb and my pin for a string of beads. I gave away my pen. I danced until I was breathless, until my feet were sore and my cheeks were red, and as I did I listened to my partners talk. There were a hundred stories in that room, a hundred lives. When the band took a break I bowed to my last partner and ran over to Dr Yu.

  ‘You are liking this,’ she said, laughing at my flushed cheeks and disheveled clothes.

  ‘I love this,’ I said. ‘I like the music. I like the people. I like what this place is called.’

  She smiled. ‘It has a good name,’ she said. ‘Since its new opening. In 1983, when the government tightened again, this room was closed for two months for weakening the spirit of revolution among the people. And all of us thought, oh, the bad times are happening again. But they were not. When this room opened again, the group which runs it said its existence was only a dream, that it flowers between one conservative movement and the next. And so the name.’

  ‘Well, it fits,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’ve been in palaces all day. You know, Walter and Katherine and Quentin and I spent the afternoon at the Summer Palace. That’s where I figured out what was going on.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ Dr Yu said. ‘There is a story from that place for you, which I have been meaning to tell you. Did you see the building at the top of the hill near the lake? The one called the Temple of the Sea of Wisdom?’

  ‘Just from a distance,’ I said.

  ‘Not much is left there to look at now. But inside that building, before the blood years, were three big golden Buddhas – one in the center, almost two stories high, and two others, a little smaller, on either side. In tradition, the one in the center represents the present. Those to the left and right represent the past and the future.’

  ‘One is like your husband,’ I said. ‘Always dreaming of the past.’

  ‘You could say this,’ she said. ‘And the other is like I am sometimes, and also I think you – always dreaming of the future. Sometimes when I was working with the pigs in the country, I would have such visions of what I wanted that I could see nothing before me.’

  ‘Your palace of dreams?’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  She nodded. ‘All the time I was in the country, I dreamed of a five-room apartment bordering Beida, overlooking the Lake with No Name. There, rather than Qinghua, because then I thought I never wanted to return to where I had been. In this place was a room for me, a room for Meng, a room for my children to share when they were home from school. Also a living room with bookshelves, in which were all my books and those of Meng and my parents, which were destroyed by the Red Guards. I dreamed a desk near the window, and a soft chair like that one in your hotel room. Actually, I dreamed exactly that chair.’

  She paused and then shrugged. ‘Chair is chair, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Especially here. Anyway, I dreamed time, space, books, light. Privacy. A smile on Meng’s face. Also maybe some small land in the Western Hills with a vegetable plot and some hens.’

  ‘That’s a pretty reasonable dream,’ I said.

  ‘But this is my point – there is no such thing. Even Marx says you cannot choose your dreams. What you wish for is determined by who you are, what life you come from. But you can choose how you act, how you live.’

  She bought two bottles of orange soda from a little boy who approached us, and then she continued. ‘These Buddhas on the hill, they were destroyed many years ago by the Red Guards, and all the bronze was melted down to make things useful for the people. I never saw them, but the story is that the Red Guards broke the left-side Buddha first, the one representing the past, because that was their job. Destroy the four olds, eliminate the past. They cracked that Buddha into small pieces and carted the pieces away. But when they returned, there was discussion over which of the others to take next. Which sequence was more politically correct? One boy said that to destroy the future is to make the present hopeless, so they
should take the middle statue first, leaving the future to stand briefly alone. China is a country of the future, he said. The future is progress. China must move ahead.

  ‘But another girl, she said no. She said that to destroy the present instantly destroys also the future, and that they must take the right-side statue and leave the center one, at least for one minute, alone. That way, she said, they would ensure that the present always exists, and a present always existing in the end is all things. And she won, or so the story goes, and for a few hours that central Buddha sat in the temple alone.’

  The band started up again, and while I puzzled over Dr Yu’s words she took my hand and spun me out in a waltz before anyone else could claim me.

  ‘What I mean,’ she said, as we twirled over the floor, ‘what I mean is that a middle way is sometimes best. Not too much looking back. Not too much dreaming ahead. Time you spend in the past and future is time you spend alone. But between them is a middle kingdom, both feet planted here.’

  The floor was filled with dancers now, all of us moving through the small lozenges of light cast by the mirror ball. Faces lit up and vanished and reappeared, and I saw a small, dark shadow flitting through the bodies, darting between the elbows and knees. A slight figure, short and airy; a nine-year-old girl sprouting leathery wings – Zillah. You’ll have a boy, Zillah said to me. With hair like Rocky’s.

  ‘What?’ I said out loud. I turned my head, but Zillah’s shadow was gone and all I could see were my dancing neighbors.

  ‘I’m right here,’ Dr Yu said, pressing her hand against mine. ‘Move your feet like this.’