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

“It up to you,” Cherry says. Apparently none of the visitors are connected to the hospital in any way. They’re free agents from the street, peddling their goods up and down the corridor just as they do on the sidewalk outside.

The compressor of the fridge heaves one last squawk and shudders to a stop. The Al Jazeera news anchor is issuing a statement denying reports that they recently broadcast a beheading on live TV. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. “Can we get another couple of blankets in here?” Larry asks, shivering in his paper-thin hospital gown.

“Again it up to you,” Cherry says-meaning that the hospital won’t provide another one but we’re free to buy one elsewhere. Since no more peddlers seem to be coming by-did the word go out that Larry’s wised up?-I conclude it’s left to me to provide. I stash my suitcase here for the time being and set off to hunt and gather.

“See you soon,” I say, squeezing his shoulder. It feels abrupt, but I’d better get some nourishment in him before he keels over.

At the elevator bank, I have time to examine the hospital a little more carefully. For a structure built just two years ago, it looks roughly used-like so many things in this country, subject to instant antiquing. It seems antiseptically clean, but on closer inspection it looks Minged up-mildewing in easy-to-reach places, its plaster wizened twenty minutes after application. Brand-new walls have scuff marks as though they’ve been around fifty years, the putty gouged out in places, the paint moldering. Right before my eyes, this ultramodern hospital shows signs of dissolving back to the sand from which it sprang. Is this why the Chinese language has no past or future tense-both are here now, in the crumbling present?

Yet another in a series of Inscrutables. The word’s less offensive as a noun, for some reason, less patronizing and pat.

“You still here?” Cherry says, passing through the elevator bank a few minutes later on her way to the stairwell. “I forgot tell you, elevator only go up.”

Outside in the smogosphere, I have a chance to list the other Inscrutables I can’t get my mind around.

INSCRUTABLES…ITEMIZED

Inscrutable of the stockings: Why do the Chinese of both sexes wear ankle stockings, even with sandals? It offends every fashion sense…

Inscrutable of the bus squat: How can people stay so long in the age-old Chinese position of waiting, snoozing on their heels for hours if need be, waiting for a bus that may never come?

Inscrutable of the One-Child Policy: Where are the pregnant people? They’re almost as invisible as members of my own generation. Intellectually I grasp the concept that the government must limit population growth, but how can a people who’ve had extended families for eons put up with a policy that mandates only one child per family, and thus no siblings, aunts, or uncles?

Inscrutable of the gradual stairs: When did the Chinese devise this method of pitching their stairs so much more gradually than Western ones? I’m forced to take them one at a time, slowing me down when I’m in a mad rush to go nowhere, as usual…

Inscrutable of the cab honking: What are those cabs trying to say as they each honk an average of sixteen times per minute? Do they really think they’re going to change my mind if they’re driving on a one-way street in the opposite direction from where I’m walking, that I’ll say, “Oh, you’re honking so well I guess I’ll go your way instead?”

Nevertheless, I’m acclimating. Now that I’m going to be living with it awhile, I have to admit that the pollution here truly is breathtaking. Beijing ’s vaporized Frappuccino was impressive, but this is something to stand in awe of. Championship-level pollution. Olympic-stature pollution. An ivory-gray effluvium stops your vision after two blocks out or five stories up. What’s worth seeing beyond that anyhow? Probably just more power pollution. It’s amazing how quickly you adjust to not being able to make out the tops of buildings. The pollution is more than a by-product; it’s a being in its own right: a living, heaving consciousness-like walking around with an old lady attached, her toothless gums clamped around your nose. Inspiring, in a way: Breathers feel, “If I can do this, I can do anything.” So I will adapt, too. My old-fashioned allergenic American prissiness is a thing of the past. I’m tubercular with confidence, convinced we’re going to succeed in our mission.

I’ll figure out my lodging later; right now I’m taking in the city. It occurs to me that Shi may be a glossy city, Shi may even be a spotless city, but our section is neither-sort of like the outer reaches of Queens. Unlike Beijing, all tricked out for the Olympics, Shi is old-time China. The taxis are not on their first coat of paint, as in Beijing. The bikes are not the streamlined kind you see in BJ; they’re the kind your mother had in junior high, with three gears and rusty chains. The residents are not yet self-conscious about grooming themselves in public. On the other hand, there are plenty of places to relieve yourself. Ducking behind a cluster of weeds wouldn’t be out of character almost anyplace in this section of Shi. Helps keep down the dust, too.

And the smell! The smell is another presence, like the pollution, an entity that lives its life while you live yours. In the dull smogshine, the smell is like dried seaweed packed into the tops of your sinuses with wooden chopsticks. Seaweed with a hint of old cat urine to it. Except it’s not cats. Time to admit: It’s human beings. Billions of human beings.

And the traffic! If the traffic getting to Shi was somehow brilliant, here in the city’s center it’s genius. Watching safely from the sidelines allows me to view it objectively, enough to drop all preconceptions of what traffic should look like. I know I’ve seen this kind of organized disorder before, but where? With starlings swarming ahead of a thunderstorm? With amoebas seen through a microscope, clumping together, then flowing forth again to ooze against its limitations?

No. What it’s really like: pedestrian traffic. After all, if a person is strolling on a crowded sidewalk and something catches her fancy in a shop window, she’d think nothing of stopping, backing up a little, making her way over against the current of people. Nobody would get mad if she veered at a right angle or lunged ahead if the shop looked like it was about to close. So it is with the car traffic here. They’re not drivers, they’re motorized pedestrians.

Once you crack the code, even the gridlock makes sense. It’s less a vehicular traffic jam than a jam of people who happen to be in cars. People jockeying for position, nudging their way across the flow, pressing forward or backward by small degrees. And for all that, there are very few accidents, just as you rarely see pedestrians getting into accidents with one another. Drivers are so free to drive as they like that they’re free to avoid crashing, too. At home we’re in our straight and narrow lanes, so when an accident looms, our options are straight and narrow as well. We can steer to avoid it, but we’re so stiffened by habit that we lack flexibility. When a Chinese collision looms, the drivers are more creative in their escape tactics, even if that involves a sidewalk or two. Freeform driving allows for freeform avoidance.

It occurs to me that the way we got Larry to where he is now has worked a lot like this Chinese traffic. We’re adapting to the native credo: Stay loose. Find your own way. Don’t merely think outside the box; bust the box down, baby!

Lifting my hand in a flood of taxicabs, I’m instantly engulfed. To test their skill, I refrain from moving my feet until the last minute to see how close they land. The one closest to my toes happens to be a pedicab, like a rickshaw on a bike, so I climb aboard. Here’s the conversation the pedicabbie and I have on the way to the supermarket.