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

As if mirroring my mood, the bass sounds like a death knell, syncopated. It’s energetic, but it’s death.

There are more tears, not springing from her seal eyes but leaking, falling silently onto the shellacky crust of her crème brûlée, mixing with the soft custard beneath. “I am sorrow for this sorrowness,” she says.

“Don’t apologize,” I say. I don’t want to make her cry harder. Yet maybe I do, because suddenly it’s vitally, perversely important for me to hear myself telling her about Tiananmen. That it wasn’t the way her government makes it out, they mowed down thousands…

“I know.” She is weeping. “I hear a little bird of this.”

Still I make her weep more. It’s like draining a wound as I speak. They machine-gunned innocents…they ran over teenagers with tanks…they disemboweled one another, they torched one another. It’s been a lot of years now, but that hasn’t dulled the horror of it in one degree…

Suddenly I’m claustrophobic, just when the appetizers arrive with the bill. We have to leave. We can’t stay here. Besides, her train leaves in less than an hour. I take her hand to escort her to a cab. Up front, the driver swims slowly through the traffic, as though sensitive to our restless, funereal mood. The cab feels like a hearse.

“This is not a joyride,” she says.

“No, more of a joy die,” I confirm.

She doesn’t look at me. “You want take that ride?” she asks.

“I can’t,” I say. “My family…”

I turn away. There’s another reason I can’t take that ride, I acknowledge to myself. I’m an American. I don’t want to be like that Foreign Service guy from the temple who felt he wasn’t from anyplace anymore. Also-and this seems almost as important, somehow-my hat needs cleaning. It’s collected two months worth of limbo dinge; any more and it might never come clean. So there we are.

But of course the main reason I can’t-I know it, she knows it-is if I did, I’d be stuck here for good. Situation not splendid, or splendid in its own way, even though it means we’ll never see each other again.

I lift the hand I’m still holding, plant kisses on it. Not a few. Many.

“You are doing this because you are cold?” she asks, not flinching.

“No,” I say. I put her hand away. Her tears continue, silently, a reluctant leakage. But now I’m perverse in a new way and want to make her laugh. “And what about you? You are crying for the duck we ate?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she says, sniffling and smiling.

“Or for the ducks of my home?”

“All of them.” She laughs through her tears.

“Because I can eat the ones at home, too, if that will make you feel better.”

“No no no!” She laughs, beating fists into her lap and crying more now, making so many bubbles in her teeth that I can’t keep track of them all. Are these the same bubbles as the ones I fell for so long ago? They aren’t, of course-woe, woe!-she must be making new ones all the time. This thought fills me with unease, but also a kind of joy. She’s using herself up but also remaking herself all the time! Again I have the unlikely thought: She must never die! How can the flower of Chinese youth bite the dust, and by extension American youth, all of us everywhere? They must never suffer depressionism, or earthquick, or even death when death is due. I can’t ask such a thing, can I, Cool God? Or is that how it works: You dare to hope for whatever you can, the bolder the better?

“I know why I came here,” I say. “Looking at you, so young, I understand. Larry and I were young together. Now he’s facing death. But he’s the first person I care about in my family’s generation to be up against it like this. There was no way I was going to let death take him without a fight.”

“I understand this,” Jade says.

“Even a baby fight, even a token resistance. This was my protest, my shrimpy sit-down strike, saying you can’t snatch us that easily, every damn time, we’ve got to be able to postpone the inevitable just a tiny bit longer…”

“I am capable to understand all this.”

“I know you are. Whatever is the true, whatever is the false, I know you know.”

“I do,” she says.

“We’re still naïve, you and me. I’m the most naïve of all, to think I could come here without knowing anyone and score an illegal kidney. To think that Larry has the golden heart even though I’ve seen the awful tarnish on it. This kind of naïveté is irresponsible, reckless-the Disapproving Docs are right!-almost inexcusable. And yet I keep it, I prize it…”

“Me as well.”

“To feel about you the way I do-”

But we bang the cab in front of us. We’re in a queue of cabs jostling for position in front of the train station. And suddenly it’s a mob scene even worse than two months ago, because after all the Chinese population has continued to grow in the last sixty days. People are coming in on ancient trains from the countryside who’ve never been to a city in their lives. They are bewildered country bumpkins with stick-out hair who’ve never seen a Caucasian before, certainly not one with a wiry goatee and a panama hat, holding the hand of a twenty-four-year-old Chinese woman, leading her to her track.

“What is your name?” I shout, pulling her along in the crush.

“You know my name.”

“No, your real name.”

She tells me. I have to have her repeat it. “Jinghua.”

“Jinghua,” I say.

“Jeeeeeen, jeeeeen,” she prompts.

I pull my lips back over my front teeth. “Jeeeeeen.”

“Gwuah!”

It’s a throat thing, deep near my tonsils, an uncustomary sound, almost obscene, like kissing the inside of a flower or tonguing a humming-bird. No wonder her teeth are always wet; it’s like soul-kissing in a sun shower. I dig the sound out with my breath and utter it forth, the sound of what she goes by, the sound of who she is. “Jeeeeen-gwah!”

“Give it up!” she shouts.

The peasantry is gawping at us, more than one of them with fingers in their noses, causing the pedestrian jams to thicken. It’s almost time for her train to leave. We shove and wedge until finally we’re at her track.

“I must get something off my chest,” I tell her as we approach her train, steaming there like an old workhorse. “I’m reluctant, but I feel I must.”

She looks frightened.

“I’ve been around the world a few times. I’ve seen a lot of things, but you…”

Our hands are pulled apart as the peasantry intervenes, looking dazed as they shuffle through. This is the ageless, long-suffering substance of the Chinese nation, deeply sunburned, immemorially burnished by the sun as though they’ve been sleeping outside for centuries, in the fields with their crops for millennia. They’ve been rained on by history, they’ve had the elements happen to them for so long that it’s like they’ve become part of the elements, an elementary force of nature. Most of them are pushing one another unthinkingly, but some are stopping in their tracks to stare at the Western man with the Eastern woman who is weeping openly now, groping for each other’s fingers.

“But you,” I resume, “are more beautiful even than a cauliflower.”

The tears gush forth in a spurt of laughter, which she fights to stifle because she has something to tell me in response.

“So may we never use the word ‘love,’ not proper between father and daughter…”

“Okay,” I say.

“But maybe, when I have babies, I tell them I love them. Maybe our generation will be different. May be…”

“Good-bye, daughter I never had.”

“Do not remove my memory from you heart, please.”

“I do not. Never. Never.”

“I miss forever your smart face and pretty sound.”