Maureen McHugh - China Mountain Zhang

Then while it is cooking I sit down and tap the system. I am not going to scribble anything, I just want to try to imagine a beach house. And so I try. I try to imagine something that looks as insubstantial as paper, maybe sliding walls.

23 seconds.

Disgusted I get up and go back to the beans and rice. But there's nothing to do but wait. I try the beach house again.

28 seconds.

Back to the rice and beans. And then again, the beach house.

19 seconds.

Woo Eubong taps in for twenty, thirty minutes at a time. She sits at the desk for three hours, working, answering questions, dropping back into her work. I have even tried to mimic her posture. I am so frustrated I could hit something. I force myself into the chair and decide I will keep doing it until I manage. I imagine the beach house.

Contact breaks.

I imagine the beach house.

Contact breaks.

I tap in.

Contact breaks.

The flimsies pile up by the printer and finally I override the system and tell it not to print unless I tell it to.

And finally, I give up, get up, put away my beans and rice uneaten and go to bed. I am not, am not, will never be, a daoist engineer.

I wake up. Some burden has been lifted. I have discovered that I am not capable, and now I no longer have to try. Or even if I am capable, it doesn't matter. Tonight I will come back, eat rice and beans, and work on my project for the University.

I work well this day. Woo Eubong told me that by the time I left I'd be able to review thirty, forty jobs a day, and she is correct. I have learned a great deal about engineering and however strange her teaching methods may be, I am grateful. Even for all those days of doing heating and cooling systems.

At the end of the day I am feeling pleased with myself. It doesn't bother me when Woo Eubong says, "You have homework."

I wait. I'd prefer to work on my project, but I have three weeks to do that and it is almost finished already.

"I want you to scribble again, the way you did when you first came."

"How many?" I ask.

"Three," she says.

Okay. I'll have time to work on my project. "Good," I say. If I finish my project I can do some shopping, buy things to send home.

So I go home, take out my beans and rice and sit down to scribble. I'll do my three, eat, and then work on my project. Above my desk the scroll reads "Inaction."

I can say for the first time that I really don't care. I am thinking a little that when I finish I can do some work on my project, but my mind is empty. I am not trying to succeed.

I tap in, remember to tell the system to produce a flimsie. I do not think of anything for a moment, I have to think of something to scribble. The beach house is as good as anything else. All white, but this time it isn't paper I think of, but ice. I think again of Borden Station. I invision a huge expanse of window. It's not very Chinese, more like the glass and steel tradition of New York. Something long and low, and I know how it should flow. A great room, a kitchen divided by very little wall, slightly higher than the long great room with it's window looking over the ocean-

And I reach. For a moment there is no perspective and I am on the edge of panic, but instead I give in, I let myself be swallowed by the emptiness and instead I expand, the system becomes my own memory. I fall through. I feel my mind's boundaries, I know how little I can think about at one time, and then those boundaries become unimaginably huge and I am myself, myself, but able to think and have the thing I think in my mind without holding it, without concentrating, because I am using the system to concentrate for me. The system is there for me, a part of me. To modify the house I only have to think it and it is so, it hangs there. I am outside it, seeing the long portion of the house that is the kitchen and great room, off the kitchen the steps down to the beach (and at the landing, there I use my paper screen, although I have to come up with some substitute for paper that has the lucent qualities but is not so fragile.) The bedrooms are beyond the kitchen, higher to take advantage of the uneven terrain (also in memory) and I think that this western building needs a tile roof. Blue chinese tile. Soften the variation in the roof height and the roof becomes a wave.

I stop, and look around the room. The printer sighs and there is the flimsie. I pick it up. The things I have designed (little more than a shell, not real finish yet) are all there. 14 minutes.

I begin to shake. What if I can't do it again? I close my eyes, tap in, look for the beach house, expand-

It is there.

I drop out and look at the flimsie I am holding. I feel limited, I miss the system. I close my eyes, expand-

And even sitting there, the shell of my beach house just hanging there, I can feel that I am crying. Because I have done it, I have done it.

I feel whole, and now it is time to go home.

It is a terrible thing to go to work with a new face. I finger my new jawline and chin. Do I wear make-up? Is it right to try to look prettier? But now that I have a nice face, isn't it right that I try to do something with it? To not wear make-up, isn't that saying that I think I don't need it?

Everyone at Cuo knows that I have a new face. All those cards, 'San-xiang! A sweet girl! May your new face match your heart!' I mean I should have had my face fixed a long time ago. I would have if my father hadn't spent my face money trying to make guanxi , connections, so that we could get back to China. As if there was any chance when America went crazy during the Great Cleansing Winds Campaign. If we had been in China we would have been safe from that, too. China is too old, too well established to have indulged in anything like the Great Cleansing Winds.

When I look in the mirror I think of all those weeks, while the virus told my bone cells to divide. I was so frightened. They told me everything that would happen, but I would be awake at night and I would think, what if it doesn't stop? Long lines of jaw grew down from my ears like curving ridges, and my teeth ached and shifted like old stones in a mountain. I would imagine my jaw grown long and heavy until my head resembled a long-faced baboon, a praying mantis. And then they injected another virus, carrying it's cargo of RNA strings materials, it's molecules to tell my bone cells to turn off, and it all stopped.

I think it is a beautiful face. Really, Mama says I am pretty now. I am normal, she says, not a vid star, but when I look in the mirror I can't believe it is there. My eyes are bigger-not waiguoren big, of course, but bigger. I have such a nice oval chin. This won't be the first time I've been out, Mama and I have gone shopping and people are so different. Sometimes they aren't as nice; it's wonderful, no pity.

At Cuo, everyone will stare at me. And even though I know I'm not ugly anymore I'm afraid to have them all look at me. They'll be thinking about my old face and comparing it to my new one. I don't want to be the old San-xiang anymore. Poor, ugly San-xiang who had no jaw and had little squinty eyes and who looked like she was congenitally stupid. This is it, my chance. I'm going to change my life. I'm going to look for a new job, have new friends, be a new person.

I'm going to put on make-up. When I get a new job no one will ever know that I was ugly and I'll wear make-up there, so I might as well start now. Practice, so when I change jobs, I'll be accustomed to my new face, and no one will ever suspect that I once looked ugly and stupid. I put on new clothes, I have a new haircut to match the shape of my new face. My temples are shaved back and my bangs fall like a horse's forelock. Very how can, as they say.

The world is new.