Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“Yes.” He pats his heart. “And for us.”

I take a breath and consider asking whether the adoption agency would happen to have an extra kidney in the system, before coming to my senses.

“Hey, have a great day,” I say. “Good luck with your little charmer.”

Obviously I’m getting too close to the line. It even almost-crosses my mind to pass out flyers in Tiananmen Square-figuring I’m giving up on China in a few days anyhow. What’re they going to do, detain me for being desperate?

Uh, yes…

That’s when I decide I need a breather. It’s been three days since the fiasco at the dialysis clinic, and I treat myself to a swim around the perimeter of the hotel’s giant kidney-shaped pool-it feels like I’m tracing Larry’s organ, writ large-and afterward make for my favorite breakfast buffet on the sixteenth floor. I lift the lids of the silver chafing dishes to ogle the food items, which seem a cross between fifties-style Betty Crocker-type hors d’oeuvres and something from an agricultural country-fair display: demure heart-shaped marshmallows topped with overchewy corn niblets, pizza-type waffle wedges topped with dino-size sausages.

While I’m filling my plate, I’m approached by a waitress I haven’t seen before. The nameplate on her olive drab uniform says TRAINEE, but she tells me her real name is Jinghua.

“Jinghua,” I say, mauling the pronunciation.

“It mean ‘situation splendid.’”

“Jinghua,” I try again, but can’t get my mouth to do that nasal thing. That mouth thing.

“Give it up,” she says, smirking demurely. “Be content at call me Jenny or Jade.”

“Jade is nice,” I say.

“So you little fairy?”

“Excuse me?”

“You try a little fairy rice?”

“Fairy rice?”

“Sorry for my simple mistake. Fry rice. Or try neuter?”

“Noodles?”

“Yes, sorry once more. Noo-dle.”

After I settle into my bamboo-and-cane throne, Jade is still with me. She stands in attendance while I sip my surprisingly great orange juice. Then she trips over her own feet just standing there but betrays no embarrassment, no lack of composure. She’s like a pony, not quite used to her long legs. I’m charmed.

“What under you hat?” she asks.

“Nothing but hair loss. See?” I show her. She studies for a moment.

“Torrible,” she says. “How old you are!”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“No, that is my question. How old?”

“Oh, me? I’m eighty-four.”

She thinks this is wildly funny. I’m becoming legendary throughout the Middle Kingdom for my rarefied sense of humor. “If you could be any age, what would it be?” she asks conversationally.

“I like being eighty-four! It’s a great age. What about you?”

“For me, I like you be twenty-five, so be my big brother.”

I meant how old would she be, but that’s okay. I’m pleased with her answer.

“But since you so old, we must content to be father-daughter.”

Works for me. She can be the daughter I never had, poised and pretty. It’s been twenty-five years since I was last in Beijing, as a foot-loose young man between wives. And how old is Jade? Twenty-four. If any of the women I’d hooked up with last time I was here had gotten pregnant, the child would be Jade’s age now. She’s a grad student of foreign relations, she tells me, only a part-time waitress, and I immediately feel more at ease with her than I ever did with Yuh-vonne-her frank, guileless face, her teeth that are as white in back as in front. But how can she, like Yuh-vonne, be so free and easy about her American name? Jenny or Jade-how can she allow her identity to be so malleable? A Chinese mystery, one of those enigmas that long ago earned the natives that awful adjective “inscrutable.”

But she’s giggling at me again, producing cute bubbles in her teeth. “You are much ability to make me laugh,” she says.

“What’d I say now?”

“Not say-do. You stir coffee with arm of sunglass.”

“That’s an American thing. All the very important people, the presidents and such, we stir our coffee with our sunglasses. It’s like a code, how we recognize each other abroad.”

“You are pulling it again, my legs!”

So I am. But in a chaste, fatherly fashion. She’s so trusting I wouldn’t have it any other way. Her dark eyes are candidly veiled, like seal eyes, peering at me with more openness than I’m used to. Maybe that’s what gives her such an air of vulnerability. For me, after being with Yuh-vonne, it’s like going from a hot dog to a cream puff, except that Jade is strong as well. She knows who she is. I reach for the clod of preternaturally bright scrambled egg, with a cowlick of parsley on top. And continue making conversation, since she shows no signs of leaving. Her supervisor sees her idling with me but backs away, bowing.

“So, Twenty-four, do you have a big brother or sister in real life?”

“No, Eighty-four. I am only one child.”

“Is it lonely for you, to be an only child?”

“Oh, no, I am glad of this. I am number one! I tell my mather, if you have another baby, I will kill it.”

“You were joking, surely?”

“No-serious!” She giggles, pleased with herself: “He he he he.” I never heard a giggle so literal before, but it works. I would say it sounds scripted, except it’s so charming.

“So you are their treasure.”

“Treasure, yes. My mather tease me, say she like her dog better than me, but I know is not true. In true, I am responsibility to be best daughter I can, safe and good. If there is tragedy and I am killed, like in earthquick, then they have no one, is torrible!” Her eyes fill with tears. “Such a thing take place sometime and is very torment.”

Every now and then, you meet someone like this-someone you feel should never have to die. How could such adorableness ever die? How could such sparkling innocence be snuffed? I want to protect her from death. I want to take her under my wing and make sure no harm comes to her-no earthquick, no depressionism, none of the things that hurt our children. Of course I can’t say any of these things, so I content myself with saying, “Your parents must love you very much.”

“I hope that,” she says ardently. “So what is your plan in this day?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“This day is my lucky day, I think,” she offers. “Because this day I show you my country to repair my English.”

This isn’t delivered flirtatiously-just earnestly. Situation splendid.

“You want to show me around? What’ll it cost me?”

She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to think ill of me…

“How much to be my guide for a few hours?” I say, tapping my watch and wallet, but this puts a shadow of shock on her face.

“Nothing!” she says. “I want repair my English-”

“Okay, yes, sorry, I’d like that. Maybe tomorrow morning?”

“We take tour. I show you fuck market?”

“Pardon…?”

“Antique and such, also modern product for deep discount?”

“Oh, sure. Folk market sounds good.”

“Where we have supper?”

“Supper? I can’t take so much of your time.”

“I am nothing to do tomorrow except working, sleeping, shopping.”

She looks so dejected that I feel like the Spanish father in the elevator, handling his baby with kid gloves.

“We’ll play supper by ear,” I say. “Where’s good to meet tomorrow morning?”

“Outside hotel. Not in lobby. I not tell hotel I doing this.”

“Undercover, eh?”

“Double-oh-seven, bang bang!” she snickers, blowing smoke off her fingertips.

“Gotcha, outside the hotel.”

I will not-I will not!-pass out flyers in Tiananmen. To distract myself I return to my luxury suite, settle myself among my 100-percent Egyptian cotton linens, and knuckle down to cast my shaggy net wider still. I wish I could use the distinguished mahogany fountain pen provided by the hotel to write letters in longhand to everyone I ever knew in the hemisphere, but I settle for e-mail. Some remedial apologies are top of the list.