Peter May - The Runner

Mei Yuan made the first toast, to the health and prosperity of the bride and groom to be. Mrs. Campbell raised her goblet to toast the generosity of her Chinese hosts, and when they had all sipped their wine, cleared her throat and said, ‘And who is it, exactly, who is going to pay for the wedding?’

Li glanced at Margaret, but her eyes were fixed on her lap. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Well, Margaret and I have discussed that,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be a big wedding. I mean, more or less just those of us who are here tonight, and one or two invited guests. We are going to keep it very simple. A tea ceremony at my apartment, a declaration at the twin altars, and then the banquet. The legal stuff is just a formality. So we thought…well, we thought we’d just pay for it ourselves.’

‘Nonsense!’ Mrs. Campbell said loudly, startling them. ‘It may be a Chinese wedding, but my daughter is an American. And in America it is the tradition that the bride’s family pays for the wedding. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.’

‘I don’t think I could allow you to do that, Mrs. Campbell,’ Li’s father said suddenly, to everyone’s surprise.

But Margaret’s mother put her hand over his. ‘Mr. Li,’ she said, ‘you might speak very good English, but you don’t know much about Americans. Because if you did, you would know that you do not argue with an American lady on her high horse.’

Mr. Li said, ‘Mrs. Campbell, you are right. I do not know much about Americans. But I know plenty about women. And I know just how dangerous it can be to argue with one, regardless of her nationality.’ Which produced a laugh around the table.

‘Good,’ Mrs. Campbell said. ‘Then we understand one another perfectly.’ She turned back to her plate, and fumbled again with her chopsticks. She would have preferred a fork, but would never admit it.

‘No,’ Mr. Li said, and he leaned over to take her chopsticks from her. ‘Like this.’ And he showed her how to anchor the lower of the sticks and keep the top one mobile. ‘You see,’ he said. ‘It’s easy.’

Mrs. Campbell tried out her new grip, flexing the upper chopstick several times before attempting to lift a piece of meat from her plate. To her amazement she picked it up easily. ‘Well, I never,’ she said. ‘I always thought chopsticks were a pretty damned stupid way of eating food.’ She picked up another piece of meat. ‘But I guess a billion Chinese can’t be wrong.’ She turned to smile at Mr. Li and found him looking at her appraisingly.

‘What age are you, Mrs. Campbell?’ he asked.

She was shocked. Margaret had told her that the Chinese were unabashed about asking personal questions. But clearly she had not anticipated anything quite so direct. ‘I’m not sure that is any of your business, Mr. Li. What age are you?’

‘Sixty-seven.’

‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘You have a year or two on me.’

‘Maybe you remember when your president came to visit China?’

‘Our President? You mean George W. Bush?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I can’t stand the little man!’

‘No. Not Bush. President Nixon.’

‘Oh.’ She was faintly embarrassed. Nixon had become something of a presidential pariah in the aftermath of Watergate. ‘Actually, I do.’

‘Nineteen seventy-two,’ the old man said. ‘They had just let me out of prison.’

‘Prison?’ Mrs. Campbell uttered the word as if it made a nasty taste in her mouth.

‘It was during the Cultural Revolution, you understand,’ he said. ‘I was a “dangerous intellectual”. I was going to crush all their heavy weapons with my vocabulary.’ He grinned. ‘So they tried to knock the words out of my head, along with most of my teeth.’ He shrugged. ‘They succeeded a little bit. But when they let me out, it was nineteen seventy-two, and I heard that the President of the United States was going to come to China.’ He paused and sighed, recalling some deeply painful memory. ‘You cannot know, Mrs. Campbell, what that meant then to someone like me, to millions of Chinese who had been starved of any contact with the outside world.’

Li listened, amazed, as his father talked. He had never heard him speak like this. He had never discussed his experiences during the Cultural Revolution with his family, let alone a stranger.

The old man went on, ‘It was to be on television. But hardly anyone had a television then, and even if I knew someone who did, I would not have been allowed to watch it. But I wanted to see the President of America coming to China, so I searched around all the old shops and market stalls where we lived in Sichuan. And over several weeks, I was able to gather together all the bits and pieces to build my own television set. All except for the cathode ray tube. I could not find one anywhere. At least, not one which worked. But I started to build my television anyway, and just three days before your president was due to arrive, I found a working tube in an old set in a junk shop in town. When Nixon took his first steps on Chinese soil, when he shook hands with Mao, I saw it as it happened.’ He shrugged, and smiled at the memory. ‘The picture was green and a little fuzzy. Well, actually, a lot fuzzy. But I saw it anyway. And…’ He seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘…I wept.’

Margaret saw that her mother’s eyes were moist, and felt an anger growing inside her.

Her mother said, ‘You know, Mr. Li, I saw that broadcast, too. The children were very young then, and my husband and I stayed up late to watch the pictures beamed live from China. It was a big thing in America for people like us, after nearly thirty years of the Cold War. To suddenly get a glimpse of another world, a threatening world, a world which we had been told was so very different from our own. We were scared of China, you know. The Yellow Peril, they called you. And then, suddenly, there was our very own president going there to talk to Mr. Mao Tse Tung, as we called him. Just like it was the most natural thing. And it made us all feel that the world was a safer place.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘And all these years later, here I am in China talking to a Chinaman who watched those same pictures, and was as moved by them as we were.’

‘Oh, spare me!’ Everyone turned at the sound of Margaret’s breaking voice, and were shocked to see the tears brimming in her eyes.

Her mother said, ‘Margaret, what on earth…?’

But Margaret wasn’t listening. ‘How long is it, Mr. Li? Two days, three, since I wasn’t good enough to marry your son because I wasn’t Chinese?’ She turned her tears on her mother. ‘And you were affronted that your daughter should be marrying one.’

‘Magret, Magret, what’s wrong, Magret?’ Xinxin jumped off her chair and ran around the table to clutch Margaret’s arm, distressed by her tears.

‘I’m sorry, little one,’ Margaret said, and she ran a hand through the child’s hair. ‘It’s just, it seemed like no one wanted your Uncle Yan and me to get married.’ She looked at the faces around the table. ‘And that’s the irony of it. Just when you all decide you’re going to be such big pals, there isn’t going to be a wedding after all.’

She tossed her napkin on the table and kissed Xinxin’s forehead before hurrying out of the Emperor’s Room and running blindly down the royal corridor.

For a moment, they all sat in stunned silence. Then Li laid his napkin on the table and stood up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and he went out after her.

She was out in the street before she realised that she had no coat. The snow was nearly ankle-deep and the wind cut through her like a blade. Her tears turned icy on her cheeks as they fell, and she hugged her arms around herself for warmth, staring wildly about, confused and uncertain of what to do now. The traffic on Tiananmen Square crept past in long, tentative lines, wheels spinning, headlights catching white flakes as they dropped. One or two pedestrians, heads bowed against the snow and the wind, cast inquisitive glances in her direction. The Gate of Heavenly Peace was floodlit as always, Mao’s eternal gaze falling across the square. A monster to some, a saviour to others. The man whose rendezvous with Nixon all those years before had somehow achieved great mutual significance for her mother and Li’s father.