and youngest son are away,’ she’d said, presumably meaning that her eldest son still lived at home. My father, heavier even than me, used to bring food home from the cafeteria where he worked, stuffed peppers and casseroles that he stowed in bags and then shared with me after my slim mother slept.
‘Wait,’ I said to her. I felt I owed her something, and Walter was headed our way. ‘Would you like to meet my husband?’ I had forgotten that Walter and I weren’t speaking.
Dr Yu nodded and blushed, and then Walter stood before us looking pained. ‘Walter,’ I said. ‘I’d like to introduce a colleague of yours. Dr Yu Xiaomin.’
Walter nodded, his dismissing, you-barely-exist-for-me nod, as easy to read in China as at home. He was tired, I knew, and depressed by the visit he’d made that afternoon to the university’s science facilities. I’d overheard him talking to Paul LeClerc on the way to the banquet, and there had been no mistaking his distress. He’d described the classrooms, bare and scarred, and the absence of equipment that would have been basic at home. ‘No autoclaves,’ he’d said. ‘No coldrooms. No electron microscope. The library doesn’t have any good journals. Thirty students share one dissection specimen. How are we supposed to help them?’ They hadn’t asked him for help, I knew; they had only asked to share their work with him and have him share his in return. But Walter had a missionary streak to him as wide as any river – he was apt to see lives different from his as something broken he was meant to fix. ‘We have to triage this,’ he’d said to Paul, quite seriously. ‘Separate the ones we can’t help from the ones we can.’ I knew he saw Dr Yu as someone past helping.
Dr Yu’s blush deepened as Walter tugged me aside and said, ‘Let’s go, I need to get out of here. The others are all on the hotel bus already. And I promised I’d talk to Fred Dobzhinski, and I’ve got things to do …’
I could have wrapped my hand around his heathery tie and pulled until his head parted from his neck. I turned and saw Dr Yu, already separated from me by a stream of people, fussing with the buttons of her blouse. She looked at me for a second and then looked away, and I looked at Walter again and saw a six-foot-tall carp standing on his tail. I pulled away from him, made my way to Dr Yu, and said, ‘I’m sorry, he’s such a prick sometimes …’
‘Prick?’ asked Dr Yu.
‘Schmuck,’ I said helplessly, knowing my meaning was still lost. ‘Asshole!’ I said much too loudly, sure Dr Yu would get this phrase despite my confusion of body parts and metaphors. ‘Not ass-face, asshole.’
Dr Yu smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ She scribbled another character on her palm and flashed it at me. ‘Hard to miss,’ she said.
‘Hard to miss,’ I agreed.
‘You will come to have dinner at my home tomorrow night?’ she asked. ‘We would be most happy – you can meet my husband and my son. My husband is a doctor and maybe he can fix your cough.’
I hesitated; the idea was impossible. We had some presentation scheduled for the next night, some show or dinner or entertainment, as we did every night. All we were ever going to see of China was the thin, thin skin, creamed and powdered and rouged and depilated.
‘Please,’ she said, watching me think. ‘It would be a great honor for us.’
I looked back for Walter but he was gone, vanished the way all of this, the singing and dancing and drinking and talking, the eating and proud hospitality, would vanish if he had his way. Already a dark yellow, sulfurous cloud hung over the city and made my lungs sting, as if I were manufacturing acid rain inside my chest. I coughed, then coughed again. I looked out the window and saw Walter near the bus, clicking his index finger against his teeth and sheltering his head with a newspaper. He stood all alone.
‘I’d be delighted to come,’ I told Dr Yu, making my mind up that instant. I liked her face, and her curiosity. And even if she’d approached me only because of my connection to Walter, it was me she’d asked to visit. ‘Can I come alone?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s what I meant.’ Quickly, while the waiters turned the lights off and the other guests left, she gave me directions. ‘Come to the Temple of Heaven,’ she said. ‘At five. Take a cab. I will meet you there at the Triple Sounds Stone and take you home – otherwise you will never find it. Is that all right?’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. She ducked into the courtyard and vanished, and I crept through the warm rain to our packed, polyglot bus. The lights inside the bus were on and the tired white faces of my companions shone starkly through the windows, mouths open in gaping yawns and eyes closed in irritation at the thought of the half-hour journey to the isolated splendor of our hotel in the Fragrant Hills.
Having made mistakes you may feel that, come what may, you are saddled with them and so become dispirited; if you have not made mistakes, you may feel that you are free from error and so become conceited … . All such things may become encumbrances or baggage if there is no critical awareness.
—Mao
THE NEXT DAY, I retraced some of my great-uncle Owen’s footsteps. He had visited China several times in the 1930s, traveling all around the country before the Japanese occupation; he’d returned twice in the late 1940s, after the end of the war. The place he’d visited most often was Beijing, where he’d stayed for months at a time in a house he rented from a friend of his, a British journalist who periodically toured the southern cities, gathering information on the student movements and the rumblings of rebellion. In her absence, Uncle Owen had cared for her house and had tried to recreate a way of life that was already obsolete.
Uncle Owen had entertained me with his China tales since I’d been old enough to listen, and after he died his companion had sent me his Beijing diaries when I’d learned that I was to make this trip. From these, I’d formed a hazy picture of this city Uncle Owen had loved. The house he’d rented had belonged to a palace eunuch before it passed to the Englishwoman, and was very old-fashioned: no plumbing, no electricity, no central heat. He read by kerosene lamps, and at night he slept on a kang – a raised brick platform heated from within by a small stove. His rooms were heated by pot-bellied stoves in which he burned balls of coal dust mixed with clay. From the peddlers who came to his door, he’d bought iced bitter prune soup and steamed stuffed dumplings, and he’d struggled, as I had, with the melodic tones of spoken Mandarin.
In winter winds so cold that he’d worn two padded jackets beneath his robe, he’d strolled through the gardens of Beihai and sipped tea by the shores of the lake. He’d befriended the servants who cared for the house, and he’d thrown parties in the courtyard, under a mat roof raised on bamboo poles. Beijing was crumbling then, its palaces and fine homes being broken up, and he’d haunted the local curio shops, training his eye and buying fabrics and brass, copper and pewter, ivory and rugs and scrolls and lacquer and small exotic carvings. When he left Beijing for the last time, just after he’d seen the new government parade past the Gate of Heavenly Peace in 1949, he said the destruction and chaos had broken his heart.
Despite that, he’d managed to profit from the confusion. ‘Upper-class people sold Ming furniture by weight,’ he’d told me. ‘Porcelains and paintings and bronzes went by the crate – everyone wanted to get rid of the things that betrayed their class status.’ He’d packed up his treasures and sent them home to Massachusetts, where they’d kept his business going for the rest of his life and had sustained
