Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

It was Hsing’s first real loss. Grandmother Meiling had been such a cheerful, kindly presence, her death had been so unexpected, so quietly abrupt, that Hsing had never been entirely aware that she was gone. It seemed as if she still lived down the corridor. To think of her was not to grieve, but to be comforted. But Rosa was lost.

Hsing brought all the vigor and passion of her youth to her first grief. She walked in shadow. Certain parts of her mind might have been darkened permanently. Her fierce resentment of the angels for taking Rosa from her led her to think that some of the older people of her ancestry were right: it was no use trying to understand other-ancestry people. They were different. They were best avoided. Keep to our own kind. Keep to the middle, keep to the way.

Even Yao, tired of fellow-workers in the plantlabs preaching Bliss, quoted Old Long-Ears—“They talk, they don’t know. They know, they don’t talk.”

“So you know?” Luis said, when she repeated the line to him. “You Chi-Ans?”

“No. Nobody knows. I just don’t like preaching!”

“Lots of people do, though,” Luis said. “They like preaching and they like being preached to. All kinds of people.”

Not us, she thought, but didn’t say. After all, Luis wasn’t Chinese Ancestry.

“Just because you have a flat face,” he said, “you don’t have to make a wall out of it.”

“I don’t have a flat face. That’s racist.”

“Yes you do. The Great Wall of China. Come on out, Hsing. It’s me. Hybrid Luis.”

“You aren’t any more hybrid than I am.”

“Much more.”

“You don’t think Jael is Chinese!” she jeered.

“No, she’s pure Nor-An. But my birthmother’s half Euro and half Indo and my father’s one quarter each Southamerican and Afro and the other half Japanese, if I have it straight. Whatever it all means. What it means is I have no ancestry. Only ancestors. But you! You look like Yao and your grandmother, and you talk like them, and you learned Chinese from them, and you grew up here in the heart of an ancestry, and you’re in process right now of doing the old Chi-An Exclusion Act. Your ancestry comes from the most racist people in history.”

“Not so! The Japanese—the Euros—the Northamericans—”

They argued amicably for a while on sketchy data, and agreed that probably everybody on Dichew had been racist, as well as sexist, classist, and obsessed with money, that incomprehensible but omnipresent element of all the histories. They got sidetracked into economics, which they had been trying to understand in history class. They talked about money for a while, very stupidly.

If everybody has access to the same food, clothing, furniture, tools, education, information, work, and authority, and hoarding is useless because you can have for the asking, and gambling is an idle sport because there’s nothing to lose, so that wealth and poverty have become mere metaphors—“rich in love,” “poor in spirit”—how is one to understand the importance of money?

“Really they were awful fools,” Hsing said, voicing the heresy all intelligent young people arrived at sooner or later.

“Then we are too,” Luis said, maybe believing it, maybe not.

“Oh Luis,” Hsing said with a long, deep sigh, looking up at the mural on the wall of the High School snackery, currently an abstract of soft curving pinks and golds, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Be an awful fool.”

She nodded.

Luis wasn’t turning out the way his father intended. They both knew it. 4-Nova Ed was a kind man whose existence was centered in his genitals. Stimulation and relief was the pressing issue, but procreation was important to him too. He had wanted a son to carry his name and his genes into the future. He was glad to help make a child for any woman who asked him to, and did so three times; but he had looked long and carefully for the right woman to bear his fatherson. He studied every word of several compatibility charts and genetic mixmatches, though reading wasn’t his favorite occupation; and when he finally decided he’d found the one, he made sure she was willing to control the gender. “A daughter would be fine if I had two, but if it’s one it’s a son, right?”

“A son you want, a son you get,” said 4-Sandstrom Lakshmi, and bore him one. An active, athletic woman, she found the experience of pregnancy so uncomfortable and time-consuming that she never repeated it. “It was your big, brown, Goddam eyes, Ed,” she said. “Never again. Here you are. He’s all yours.” Every now and then Lakshmi turned up at the 4-5 Nova homespace, always bringing a toy appropriate to Luis’s age a year ago or five years from now. Usually she and Ed had what she called commemorative sex. After it she would say, “I wonder what the hell I thought I was doing. Never again! But I guess he’s OK, isn’t he?”

“The kid’s OK!” his father said, heartily and without conviction. “Your brains, my plumbing.”

She worked in Central Communications; Ed was a physical therapist, a good one, but as he said, his ideas were all in his hands. “It’s why I’m such a good lover,” he told his partners, and he was right. He was also a good parent for a baby. He knew how to hold the baby and handle him, and loved to do so. He lacked the fear of the infant, the squeamish dissociation which paralyses less manly men. The delicacy and vigor of the tiny body delighted him. He loved Luis as flesh of his flesh, wholeheartedly and happily, for the first couple of years, and less happily for the rest of his life. As the years went on the pure delight got covered over and buried under a lot of other stuff, a lot of hard feelings.

The child had a deep, silent will and temper. He would never give in and never take things easy. He had colic forever. Every tooth was a battle. He wheezed. He learned to talk before he could walk. By the time he was three he was saying things that left Ed staring. “Don’t talk so Goddam fancy!” he told the child. He was disappointed in his son and ashamed of his disappointment. He had wanted a companion, a double, a kid to teach racquetball to. Ed had been Quad Two racquetball champion six years running.

Luis dutifully learned to play racquetball, never very well, and tried to teach his father a word game called Grammary, which drove Ed nuts. He did outstandingly well at school, and Ed tried to be proud of him. Instead of running around with the kidherd, Luis always brought a Chi-An kid over, a girl, Liu Hsing, and they shut the room door and played for hours, silently. Ed checked, of course. They weren’t up to anything more than all herdkids got up to, but he was glad when they got to their Ceremony and started wearing clothes. In shorts and shirts they looked like little adults. In their nakedness they had been somehow slippery, elusive, mysterious.

As all the growing-up rules came into force, Luis obeyed them. He still preferred the girl Hsing over all the boys and they still saw each other all the time, but never alone together with the door shut. Which meant that when Ed was home he had to listen to them as they did their homework or talked. Talked, talked, shit, how they talked. Until the girl was twelve. Then her ancestry’s rule was that she could only meet a boy in public places and with other people around. Ed found this an excellent idea. He hoped Luis would take up with other girls, maybe get into some boy activities. Luis and Hsing did go around with a group of the Quad Two teens. But the two of them always ended up somewhere, talking.

“When I was sixteen, I’d slept with three girls,” Ed said. “And a couple of guys.” It didn’t come out the way he meant. He meant to confide in Luis, to encourage him, but it sounded like a boast or a reproach.