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‘Your friend you meet is Chinese?’
I nodded. ‘And I’m late. Already. And actually, I haven’t been feeling so well.’
He looked at me gravely. ‘This is visible,’ he said. ‘You appear to have a deficiency of yin – your nose and throat feel dry?’
‘All the time,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Many fluids,’ he said. ‘Increase secretions. Also certain herbs are very helpful. Come – this stone is perhaps near south of compound.’
We rushed through the halls at great speed, and only after a hot and sweaty thirty minutes did I think to mention to him that the Triple Sounds Stone was part of the Temple of Heaven. ‘I know it’s here,’ I said. ‘I just don’t know where. The stone is somewhere in the temple.’
He groaned and pressed his small hands together. ‘Temple of Heaven?’ he said, his voice rising in real anguish. ‘Not Triple Sounds Stone – you are looking for Triple Echo Stones, in temple – is not here, is across city, twenty minutes at least by car, and how you will get a cab …’ With that he rushed me back to the main gate. There were taxis parked there, but all of them were spoken for, and after a long argument with two lounging drivers he dashed into the streaming traffic of Changan Avenue and tried his hardest to flag down one of the passing cabs. Finally he went to the white-coated policeman who stood on an island above the traffic, and by the time he’d finished shouting and throwing his arms about he’d convinced the policeman to step into the traffic himself and commandeer a cab. The driver resisted, pointing to me and then shaking his head, but he gave in when the policeman bundled me into the back seat.
‘Temple of Heaven?’ my rescuer said. ‘You are sure?’ I nodded and he gave directions to the driver. ‘How can I thank you?’ I asked.
‘You will get there,’ he called, as the car eased into the traffic. ‘No thanks are needed. But you must be more careful.’
Careful wasn’t high on my list just then. If I’d been careful I would have spent the day in bed, tending to my bronchitis; I wouldn’t have left the hotel, unarmed with guides or books, in search of Dr Yu. All week I’d been listening to the humming voice of caution: Don’t drink the tap water; don’t even brush your teeth with it. Don’t eat any fruit or any street food. Don’t lose sight of the tour bus. Don’t go out without your passport. Don’t buy jade without an expert’s advice. That voice didn’t belong to Lou, our guide – it was the voice of breakfast, all the scientists and their spouses gathered at the long tables in the hotel dining room, exchanging warnings before they split up for the day. Don’t, don’t, don’t – the list was endless and expanded each hour, and it brought out the worst in me. It made me want to stick my head under the faucet and gulp the water down, to sink my face into one of the smoked ducks that hung by their twisted necks in the smeared shop windows. Our hotel room – large, clean, privileged – had come to seem like a cage, and even when I ventured outside I carried it on my back like a turtle’s shell.
I wanted to leap from the cab and find my own way across the city, but instead I sat and watched the back of the sullen driver’s head. I was late, I reminded myself; I was an hour late already. I let the driver drop me off near the Triple Echo Stones, and I tried not to notice how he hovered until he saw Dr Yu reach out for me. She moved through a rushing stream of people, and she laughed when I apologized for being late and told her what had happened.
‘You must have been meant to go there,’ she said. ‘The places are separate, but also connected. In the old days, the Emperor marched out of the Forbidden City each October with his elephant carts and lancers and musicians and high nobles, and all of them headed here. The Emperor meditated in the Imperial Vault of Heaven, stayed all night in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, and made a ceremony next day at the Round Altar, which decided the future. People hid behind their shutters and prayed again and again for everything to go well. It is an ill omen if anything goes wrong here.’
‘Have we done anything wrong yet?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’
I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together three times, a gesture left over from a time when I thought ruby slippers and a good witch could fix my life. My future, the one I’d been waiting for, seemed to lie just around the corner, and what I wished for was that it would hurry up.
Dr Yu smiled at my antics. ‘Is your husband still angry?’ she asked.
I leaned against a pillar and coughed. ‘Still,’ I said. Walter’s behavior at the banquet last night had broken down some of the barriers between Dr Yu and me, and I felt I could tell her the truth. She’d already seen him at his worst. ‘Madder, now, since I told him I was coming to meet you. He went with all the others to the Exhibition Hall, to see some singers and acrobats and stuff.’
Dr Yu made a face. ‘That’s so boring,’ she said. ‘It is only for tourists. Why does he stay mad so long? Is this typical of those from North Dakota?’
I laughed. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘How did you know where he’s from?’
‘I read it somewhere,’ she said. ‘I remembered it because my own father was trained near there – he got his PhD in Minnesota before the Anti-Japanese War. Physicist. After Liberation, he returned here to aid his country.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Dead,’ she said simply. ‘They put a high dunce cap on his head and paraded him through the streets of Shanghai during the early part of the Cultural Revolution. They called him an American spy, a counterrevolutionary, a capitalist roader. His hat said, “Cow’s ghost and snake’s spirit” – do you know this saying?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘My great-uncle used to tell me stories he learned here when he visited, about plants and rocks and snakes who could turn themselves into people and do remarkable things and then turn back to their original shapes.’
‘Different story,’ she said. ‘Cow’s ghost and snake’s spirit are demons who can assume human forms for the making of mischief. Mao said intellectuals resembled these – that they pretend to support the Party, like humans, but they revert to demons when criticized. They were called “cows” for short; they were locked up in places called “cowsheds.” My father was put in a cowshed at his institute. He died of fright, or shame, or anger – who knows? He had a bad heart.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said; I didn’t know what else to say. I’d hardly stopped to consider what her life had been like during those years, any more than I’d considered what she might want from me.
She smiled quietly. ‘It is in the past,’ she said. ‘I only remember my father said people from cold places have cold hearts. Your uncle visited with us?’
‘My great-uncle,’ I said. ‘He visited many times before Liberation – it must have been around the same time your father was in the States.’
‘Such coincidence,’ she said, and then she waved her hand at the buildings behind us. ‘Do you like the temple?’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said. She showed me the sacred altar and the enormous vault and the main hall’s painted, swirling ceiling, and then we stood on the Triple Echo Stones and clapped our hands together, listening for the sound to return – another thing, I knew, that Uncle Owen had done. We were interrupted by a group of Japanese tourists, led by a woman with a bullhorn and an umbrella crowned with a yellow streamer. Video cameras sprouted like snouts from the faces of the men. Dr Yu and I moved away and examined an ancient tree and a garden of roses, all the time talking easily. I forgot about her family, waiting at home, and I remembered only when Dr Yu looked at her watch and said, apologetically, ‘It’s almost seven now – perhaps we should go?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’ll take the local bus to my home. It’s very crowded, but not very far. You have ridden on one?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. The bus was one of the things we’d been forbidden.
‘You hang on then,’ she said. ‘Press when I say.’
The bus that pulled up to the corner was full, overfull, bulging; it was absolutely impossible that anyone else should squeeze on. ‘PRESS!’ Dr Yu said as we reached the door, and then she shoved me into the tangled crowd. Her hands pushed my shoulders; her knees nudged mine; somehow we were on the bus and rattling down the street. People drew away from me, staring frankly at my eyes and breasts. I coughed loudly and they watched and coughed back. My chest was killing me. A baby three feet away turned and saw my face and burst into frightened cries, and Dr Yu apologized to his mother. We rode toward the setting sun, and at a street corner indistinguishable from the others Dr Yu wedged herself behind me and popped me through the open door. I tripped on the step.
‘We’ll walk now,’ she said. ‘Home is only three blocks away.’
In the dusk the streets were lined with people. Old women crouched over charcoal braziers or bubbling woks, cooking their families’ meals. Clumps of children darted by, falling silent at the sight of me. A man in a blue jacket pedaled past, pulling a load of kindling on a cart, and a woman who hardly came up to my waist tottered by on miniature, once-bound feet. Above me I heard birdsong, and when I looked up a man tending bamboo cages on a balcony spat at my feet and then grinned, exposing three teeth. An outdoor market covered much of the sidewalk.
Dr Yu inspected everything as we made our way between the stalls, naming what she touched for me. Zhusun, bamboo shoots; qiezi, eggplant; doufu, beancurd. The steamed buns were baozi and the duck, ya. I drew the words in happily but knew I’d lose most of them. Dr Yu explored four of the chickens, her hands pressing the breasts and thighs and checking the beaks and combs before she chose the fattest one. She paid with a handful of bills a third the size of my solemn Foreign Exchange Currency – tiny green notes printed with ships, even smaller mustard ones depicting trucks loaded with grain, misty mint ones bearing giant bridges. ‘Renmibi,’ she explained – the money Lou had forbidden us to have. ‘Peoples’ Money.’ She stuffed the newspaper-wrapped chicken under her arm.
‘We are here,’ she said, pointing at a cluster of six pale green, ten-story, cement-block buildings. She showed me the cluster’s coal-burning heating plant and its mountain of coal, as well as the primary school and the series of low bicycle sheds packed with identical bikes. But because she explained none of it, doing me the honor of acting as though I could understand what I saw, my head filled with questions as we climbed the unlit stairwell to her sixth-floor flat.
Dr Yu’s husband was waiting for us inside the living room, hunched on a narrow couch and watching TV while his oldest son read. Both of them stood when Dr Yu brought me in. She said something quick in Mandarin and then she turned to me and said, ‘I present my husband, Dr Zhang Meng. Also my oldest son, Zhang Zaofan. Zaofan in your language means “Rebel.”’ I smiled and she turned to her family. ‘Meet Grace Hoffmeier,’ she said. ‘Wife of famous lake ecologist Doctor Professor Walter Hoffmeier.’
I nodded, although I didn’t like being introduced as Walter’s wife. The elder Zhang bowed. ‘So pleased,’ he said dryly. ‘Your husband’s work is well known to my wife.’ Before I could respond, he gestured at the battered wardrobe, the sagging couch, the scarred table holding up the small black-and-white TV. ‘You will excuse our furnishings,’ he said. ‘All things of worth were taken from us. My father’s books, his scrolls …’ He shrugged. ‘It’s an old story,’ he said. ‘Same old story you hear from everyone.’
He wore his gray pants belted high over a small round stomach, which seemed to stem more from his horrible posture than from any excess weight. His worn white shirt had a frayed collar, and his shoes were laced so tightly that I wondered if they weren’t a size too big. His eyes were deep-set, sunk in a nest of wrinkles, and they kept sliding to my hair. When I coughed, they shifted to my chest.
‘Bronchitis,’ I explained.
‘At least,’ he said. ‘At least. You should go to the doctor tomorrow if you’re not better – you know where Clinic for Foreign Visitors is?’
I shook my head and coughed again.
‘You go,’ he said, scribbling the address on a scrap of paper. ‘Call me if you have any trouble. I work in the hospital wing next door.’
‘You’re a medical doctor?’ I asked, and then I remembered Dr Yu had told me this at the party and that in fact she’d offered to have her husband fix my cough. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I knew that. It’s just this fever, I’ve been confused …’
‘Thoracic surgeon,’ Dr Zhang said shortly. ‘This year, at least.’ He pursed his lips and, in a mincing voice said, ‘Is new Central Committee policy now: “Intellectuals are to be esteemed and treated as valuable.”’ He sounded as if he were quoting someone he didn’t much like.
I stammered something clumsy and then turned toward the younger Zhang, who’d been waiting silently while his father spoke. Zaofan made me forget my cough and my discomfort with his father – in that tiny, shabby room, he stood out like a rhododendron. He was as beautiful as Randy, my first husband; as beautiful as Walter’s student who’d caused me all that trouble back home. He was as beautiful as any man I’d ever seen, and when he smiled I forgot my bronchitis, my weight, and my foreign face and I felt beautiful too. Voluptuous, not fat; smooth and expansive and well-tended and creamy-skinned. I forgot how I was supposed to act. I was middle-aged, I reminded myself. I’d been married for six years. The back of my neck began to sweat.
Zaofan’s hair was long, held back by dark glasses, and he was dressed in jeans and a tight blue T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘Chongqing Construction Company – More, Better, Faster.’ A huge digital watch adorned his wrist. In Massachusetts, he would have looked hoody, but here I knew his appearance meant only that he was young, that he leaned toward Western ideas; that he was, or had been, a student. I’d seen thousands of young men dressed like him on the streets and the campuses. None of them had had Zaofan’s startling eyes or elegant bones, but many had shared his aura of eagerness.
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 old 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?
