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

“What on he plate, exactly?”

Here it is again, another moment when the rule book calls for caution. But caution works best, sometimes, when thrown to the wind. I’ve decided to try to enlist Yuh-vonne’s help.

“We’re trying to find him a kidney transplant,” I say.

Yuh-vonne betrays no emotion at this news. “But so then Laurie is Chinese?”

“American. Why?”

“How he can use Chinese kidney?”

“We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin,” I say. “In fact, come to think of it, that may have been one of the toasts I made twenty-five years ago. Let me think a minute…”

“I am suspicion of that biology,” Yuh-vonne says. “Look me in the eye.”

“It’s true, organs aren’t race-specific,” I say. “So Larry and I’ve had a couple of conversations, and the plan is, we’re giving it one week in China, and if nothing turns up, we’ll try the Philippines, then maybe Singapore and Hong Kong, see if we can shake something loose.”

“You one sunny-side-up dude. How you go about it?”

“Haven’t the foggiest yet. Black market, maybe? Is there maybe a Kiwanis-type club for kidneys or something? Networking one way or another, isn’t that always how it goes?”

“Hmmm,” Yuh-vonne says. “You have contacts?”

“Only a distant one,” I admit. “Some embassy friend of a friend I e-mailed the night before I left. But I have something better than contacts. From my previous visits, I have a sense of how huge China is and how things tend to fall through the cracks. One hand doesn’t know what the other’s doing, plus the law isn’t applied equally. There’s even a proverb that says the farther you are from the emperor, the less you can hear his voice. Meaning things are a little looser away from the center of-”

“I mean contact lenses,” Yuh-vonne interrupts. “Your eyes behold me so bright!”

“Oh,” I say. “Must be the pollution.”

Yuh-vonne has one word for me. “Guanxi.”

“Guanxi?”

“Connections. Meaning it more depend on who you know to get things done, personal relationship under radar, so to procure what you desire without no one knows.”

“Perfect,” I say. “So I’ll jump right in by asking if you have any leads.”

“I? Ha ha ha.”

“What about our driver?”

Yuh-vonne performs a double gesture, one hand waving no, the other to her lips with a shushing sound. “But why no relative depart him with kidney?” she asks in a whisper.

“Well, that’s a sad story,” I say. “Larry had a twin, Judy, who would have been the ideal donor, but she was chronically depressed and killed herself last year. By the time they found her, the kidney was beyond salvaging. And the rest of his immediate family’s gone. He’s all alone in the world, except for the larger family that he’s alienated because he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”

“This of course not microchip you speak about.”

“No, more like a gigantic grievance because of the way the family is structured,” I say. “See, he’s the son of my grandmother’s baby sister-technically, he’s my first cousin once removed-but the family dynamics were such that he was born into a different class from everyone else. My grandmother was this regal Boston lady, kind of like a prettier Eleanor Roosevelt wrapped in a Persian lamb collar, but by the time her baby sister was born, eighteen years after her, her parents had fallen on hard times and the sister ended up marrying a lovable but illiterate garage mechanic who kept having strokes. Shall I go on?”

“You talk like roller coaster! I like!”

“I know it’s a lot,” I say. “Getting this close to Larry must be going to my head. So anyway, they were good people-‘salt of the earth,’ in my family’s rather patronizing phrase-but Larry always felt he didn’t measure up, even though he’s compensated for it by getting a million degrees.”

“They no like him?”

“They appreciate a lot about him-his fight, maybe even his lack of pretense-but not the baggage that goes with it. He truly has a heart of gold unless you cross him, which he feels some members of the family have-”

And then suddenly there he is. Not Larry but Mao-twenty feet high and airbrushed since I last saw him. Hanging above the main entrance to the Forbidden City, his portrait looks younger than before, a little less weary and a little more cheery, more like a slightly menacing Ronald McDonald than the wart-faced tyrant of yore-the despot as Fred Flintstone. Twenty-five years ago, I got a bout of dysentery walking beneath him, but this time, squinting through the smoglight, I feel a family connection-that roly-poly skepticism, that chunky bullheadedness-so help me, he looks like a Chinese version of Larry.

And of course, across from the portrait looms Tiananmen Square, still as gargantuan as ever. Last time it was a geologic anomaly: the largest public square on earth, the size of ninety football fields. But this time it reminds me of the infamous student massacre, which offers me a chance to turn the tables and ask Yuh-vonne some questions.

“Do you know what happened here?”

Yuh-vonne winks lasciviously. “Inside those walls, emperor spend so much time playing with his concubine,” she says.

“No, not inside the Forbidden City,” I say. “Across the street in the square. In 1989.”

Yuh-vonne quickly averts her gaze. “Our elders will not tell us,” she says. “Many time we ask them, but they say don’t ask.”

“Do you know that students were hurt here?”

“A few,” she says carefully. “That about it.”

I bring her gaze back to me with a hand on her shoulder. “Not a few,” I say. “Hundreds. The tanks rolled right over them when they were protesting.”

“Ow my God!” she says, sucking in her breath. “I have to go tawlet!”

“Seriously?”

“No, I can wait,” she says, but she looks constipated suddenly, buttoned up.

On the square as we drive past, children are flying kites and shrieking. Young women are ambling through with frilly little ankle socks. Old women are limping along with parasols held high against the sun. But where are the people my age? Where are the Red Guards of the seventies who performed such monstrous deeds against their countrymen, to say nothing of the Tiananmen Square student protesters of the late eighties? They couldn’t all have been massacred here, could they? Or do they avoid this spot? Come to think of it, I’ve seen hardly any people my age since arriving at the airport.

Mostly what I see are soldiers, skinny adolescent soldiers everywhere, clumps of sunken-chested, pimply boys at rest, horsing around in their olive green uniforms, fragile boys encased in weaponry, roughhousing with one another, bored and playful as boys anywhere, putting one another in headlocks, dropping spit bombs before smearing them into the concrete with their boots, snapping cell shots to send their mothers. Boys.

“You know the Cultural Revolution?” I ask Yuh-vonne.

“It-take-place-’67-to-’77,” she says in a flat tone. “But I didn’t born then.”

“What do you think of it?”

For the first time, I see that her lips are bitten up, self-inflicted, bespeaking an inner severity at least as harsh as any state-sanctioned one. “Maybe-a-good-thing-in-beginning-but-then-a-bad-thing.”

“So where the hell are all-”

“People nowaday very happy and rich,” she says, to shut me up at last. As if on cue, we get cut off by a limo even bigger and shinier than ours.

“We only poor limo, but he rich rich limo!” She rolls down the window and sticks the upper half of her body out. “I love you, China!” she shouts, arms outstretched.

And off we speed down the avenue to my hotel a few blocks away, the damp furnace of China ’s summer air blasting in through the open window.