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

The air, when all is said and done, is no laughing matter. It’s totalitarian pollution, a one-party blanket of smog so supersaturated that it can’t absorb the smoke from the sidewalk barbecues, much less the blue plumes from firecrackers that erupt out of nowhere, veiling all.

I’m lost. Even though the arms of the hospital are more or less visible through the haze, tonight they spread like the wings of a malevolent owl, leading me nowhere I want to follow.

I’m wet, or about to be. In a spot not far from the hospital, a promenade functions as a nighttime amusement area for adults, between fake volcanic rocks and a patio for old-timers to do their tai chi. But as I’m venturing closer, a fountain of colored water erupts from the rocks, drenching me head to toe.

Wet and lost as I am, I understand that these old-timers were my first enemies. Delicately doing tai chi between the fountains, these are the infamous Red Chinese of my childhood, the ones we were told were sadistically brainwashing American POWs in secret North Korean camps. And here I’ve put myself at their mercy, surrounded by them on all sides…

The next group is even worse. After so many days of not seeing people my age, I run into a whole brigade of them on a terrace by the promenade, and it hits me that they’re the original Red Guards who committed some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. While we student activists were making hay at home with a pretend revolution, our counterparts in China were making real hay, forcing millions out of the cities to reap grain in the countryside, butchering intellectuals and raping ballerinas and turning themselves into the human equivalent of swirling dragons and flaming serpents.

And what’re they doing on this sweltering September night? Waltzing. After all the carnage they wrought, they’re waltzing to old songs from the 1930s playing on an ancient gramophone. “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” “The Touch of Your Hand.” “Falling in Love with Love.” Lit up in the smoglight, their eyes red in the glow of firecrackers, they turn gracefully clockwise, changing steps to turn counterclockwise. How can they be dancing, after all they’ve done, like Nazis doing a jig on the graves of their victims? But they’re sad-looking, and their waltz is sad. Wreathed in smoke, they sense that I’m of their generation. They beckon to me: “Join us!”

Never have I felt more a stranger. I withdraw into the shadows.

When the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed.

Next morning there’s a dead body on the sidewalk. Outside a bakery where I’ve gone to grab breakfast, the baker lies faceup on the asphalt, still wearing his white chef’s hat. He’s a big, florid man; it’s inscrutable that he used to have energy enough to keep his bulk upright-and that suddenly he doesn’t. Two women stand above him, waving their arms and making their pocketbooks swing. A police officer also stands over the chef, his car parked casually in the middle of the street. The tableau would have been unthinkable only a moment ago; now it’s as banal as dirt.

Then we onlookers, being not dead, go about our business, as the Vermont poet said. Life goes on: The take-out window ten feet away doesn’t even suspend its business, cash bills handed in, steamed buns handed out. I order a half dozen little pastries with almonds stuck in sweet white goo. A treat: If this is a bad omen of some sort, all the more reason to make sure I keep my spirits up…

Returning to the Super 2, I arrange to keep getting Internet in my room. The unfriendly receptionist in her flounce is never happy to see me, nor is the Internet an easy concept to express to her in party language, but eventually we work it out.

“So it’s all set for me keep accessing from my room?”

“Okay-okay,” she answers with a forced smile.

“I steal Tsingtao shot glass with lukewarm coffee from lobby, okay?”

“Okay-okay.”

“I go upstairs cry my heart out, okay?”

“Okay-okay.”

Sometimes the only way to make sense of your surroundings is to reach out to a far-off source. So now in my little Super 2 roomette, with paint droplets from the construction floating down and hardening on the outsides of my windows, I spend the day deep-Googling. I learn that Shi is an industrial city with little charm, known predominantly for two things: exceptional hospitals and a plethora of massage parlors. The first fact I’ve gathered by now, but the massage parlors are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of the Web sites offer virtual tours of their palatial interiors: fantasy temples with saltwater grottoes, saunas decorated with ceramic parrots and ceramic eagles, complete with discreetly bowing hostesses giving the revolving doors a little spin to help you through…

Larry’s right. Massage Central is where I’ve landed us.

And other facts. (It’s laughably easy to get information, despite there being an estimated thirty thousand Keystone Kops devoted to blocking Web sites seemingly at random.) Those fountains of last night that I found so alien, they were nothing worse than replicas of Old Faithful in honor of the U.S. of A., going off every quarter hour with a big blast at midnight. Also, sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are Chinese, and Shi is among the top performers.

Yet for all its flaws, there’s something about this land that makes people want to waltz. As I munch on cold shrimp and celery cubes left over from breakfast, I recall one of the only times I’ve ever waltzed in my life, twenty-five years ago, when I was taking an overnight steam train through Shandong province, and at a rural station the woman I was traveling with started waltzing me beside the track. The fields around us were filled with peasants sleeping in the open air, with a small fire at the entrance to each family’s field of crops, but dozens of them roused themselves to stand and watch the strange sight of us dancing under the moonlight. Does something similar motivate the Red Guards to waltz? The haunting vision of last night is still fresh in my mind, those revolutionaries waltzing to old American favorites from a time before they were born…

By late afternoon, when I get to the hospital, I’m determined to figure out where the badminton noise is coming from. Before even checking in on Larry, I walk down the halls past the Family Crush Room, turn left at Sufferers Locker Room, and enter a wing I haven’t been to before. The badminton sounds grow louder, and soon I find an empty corridor where two ferocious Arabs in long robes are lunging for a birdie. I’m impressed: all that fierce heft in service of a corrugated plastic birdie. They’re really throwing themselves into it, their grandstanding cutthroat but silent, so hushed that the only sound is their bare feet making quick grippy noises on the glittering marble floor.

I whistle in admiration after a particularly savage smash shot hits one of the guy’s kaffiyehs. The ice is broken.

“You belong to America?” the smasher asks.

I admit it. Even though I know it’s stupid to do so when in dicey territory, I’m never able to pretend I’m Canadian. “I do belong to America. You?”

“ Saudi Arabia,” says the smasher.

“ Yemen,” says the smashee.

Our conversation draws visitors from a communal kitchenette off the hallway. Five men slip out to join us, reticent and stern. One of them, a lanky young fellow in Western clothes, sips judiciously from an Oodles of Noodles steaming from the microwave. “You here for a liver?” he asks me.

“Kidney,” I say. “For my cousin.”

“Me also,” he says, giving me a fist bump. “Kidney for my father.”

“Liver for my brother,” says the Yemenite smashee. “Lung for his uncle,” he adds, since the Saudi smasher is too intent on his serve to speak for himself.