Howard Goldblatt (Editor) - Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today

She was a long time registering my request. First, she said she'd run out of tea; then she said there wasn't any water ready boiled and the fire in the stove had gone out. She talked on and on, sitting there in her chair. Finally, she said, "Love?"

For the seventy-second time, I thought to myself, I've got to go. But somehow I couldn't make myself get up. The sun, three hours of whose light I'd squandered while sitting in there, had sunk down past her kitchen. In that room in the fading light, I noticed her foot had gotten fatter, too, cocked up on her knee and squeezed into a sneaker. Still, there was no way I could bring myself to say, I've got to go. In the silence, I could almost see her after I'd gone, still sitting there.

I finally did get the drink of water. I was the one who lit the stove. When the water was just about to boil, I broke the silence: "How about a stroll over to Wild Goose Pagoda?" She said it was all the same to her whether she went or not. Then another half hour of silence before I suggested again that we go to the pagoda. In the meantime, she had turned on some music, let it play for about a minute, and turned it off again. At last, I found the strength to stand up and say, "I've got to be going." Her eyes (they looked fatter, too) seemed to say that she wouldn't oppose the wishes of anyone in the world. In other words, I was free to come and go as I pleased.

We went out, and she escorted me across the campus. Some students were playing volleyball. I said I had to use the rest room. She gave me directions on how to get there. It seemed so complex: I had to turn several corners and go all the way inside some building. When I came back, she had changed her mind. (I thought that it was fine for her to have made up her mind in the first place; if she changed it back again, all the better.) I told her what I had just been thinking, and she told me that we could take a shortcut to Wild Goose Pagoda, that there were a lot of vendors selling Xi'an-style snacks near the pagoda, and that we could have for dinner some things I couldn't find in Beijing. That interested me. I didn't remind her, though, what a terrific gourmand she used to be.

I practically had to force her to decide whether or not she was going to climb the tower, and then I had to tell her three times, "If you don't want to climb it, you can wait for me at the bottom." As far as I recall, this was all we said along the way. Walking together, riding the bus, stepping off the bus, and continuing to walk on, we were locked into an acute awkwardness. She said she may as well climb the pagoda, so I went to buy a couple of tickets. Going up (seven stories in all), I wasn't sure if I should give her a hand or if we should each make our own way. I figured I'd let my elbow bump hers on the way up-that way, she could decide what to do. I kept thinking that's what I was going to do, but I may not actually have done it. Through the four windows of the pagoda's top story, we gazed out at the city and suburbs of Xi'an, spreading out as far as the eye could see… If it had been just me going up the pagoda, that last phrase wouldn't have stuck in my mind.

We left Wild Goose Pagoda and walked along at a moderate pace. "Shall we get something to eat?" She seemed to have forgotten about the eating part. Neither of us was hungry at all, but we each had a deep-fried dried persimmon. All I could think about was rushing to the bus station and getting away from her as soon as possible. Then of all things, she started going on about how there used to be so many snack vendors around this place, but now there's hardly anything except for stuff like bean noodles. As for me, I was still thinking of the twenty cents I'd spent on those two dried persimmons. She said she knew of a good restaurant near Dachai Market but didn't say if she thought we should go or not. I said, "Let's head over there." We headed over.

Dachai was bustling and brightly lit. She led me into a food shop selling pastries. I asked her, "What's the point of coming in here?" So we went right out again and started on a search for that unfindable restaurant. Already it was seven-thirty, and most of the restaurants had shut down. Red faces of drinkers careened out of restaurant doors. We kept on, walking from street to street with no idea what we were after. All I could think of was hurrying to a bus stop so I could get away from her. But the city buses were so crammed full of people that we didn't feel like getting on any of them.

The stores all sold cassette players, leather jackets, shampoo- stuff like that. We walked into yet another restaurant, a dumpling place, where everybody was eating standing up. We walked right out again, but as we did, she kept looking over her shoulder, back inside. Then there was another place, which had run out of everything but pig organs. She said she just couldn't remember where that one good restaurant was. We slipped into a wonton place and had a bowl apiece; I paid, of course. Then I asked her if she was taking the number 3 bus or the number 1. I figured if she took the 3, I'd take the 1. She said either would do. I said I wanted to go to the long-distance bus station to order a ticket and asked her if she wanted to come along. Why I had to suggest that to her, I don't know. We went all the way through the night market again, through all the boiling and frying and clouds of steam, through all the people milling around and bumping into me. I had no idea, none, what the connection was between her and me or why we absolutely had to walk along here, getting shoved and elbowed, or if I really had to buy a long-distance bus ticket. When she saw me actually holding a bus ticket for early the next morning, she pointed to a shop next door selling southern-style foods and then pointed inside the place at some kind of soft, fluffy cake. I ignored her. Then we stood in a corner of this city where I didn't know a soul, waiting for the local bus to come. It came.

I managed to grab an empty seat for her. "Bye," I said when I got to my stop (which came before hers). She turned her face toward the window. I got off the bus but wasn't relieved at all. Nine-thirty in the Xi'an suburbs, walking through mud, suddenly I was hungry. As luck would have it, there ahead of me stood a place selling meat pastries and, incredibly, it was still open for business. I had a couple of the pastries (good ones, too) and washed them down with a bowl of hot sticky-dumpling soup. When I walked outside, I thought I saw the bus carrying Xiao Tong still coming toward me down the road, and I wondered whether I really had seen her.

"Next stop Xi'an -end of the line. One of our nation's renowned ancient cities, Xi'an has served as capital for more than ten dynasties over the long history of the Chinese people…"

Xi'an.

The woman conductor had just yanked the woolen blanket out from underneath my pillow. I hopped down from the upper berth. Xi'an. No need for the woman on the PA system in that tiny one-and-a-half-square-meter booth (every time I went to the toilet, I saw her sitting there, right next door to the toilet) to make the announcement; from the train's deceleration, I already knew Xi'an was coming up. Just like all the other times I had shouldered my satchel and prepared to step into the press of disembarking passengers, I thought perhaps I ought to make some sort of parting remarks to the acquaintances I'd made on the trip. But I didn't. I did, however, make a rough calculation of my expenses since I'd started out just the day before: two box lunches, one beer, a cold plate of beef, and the noodles for breakfast. Altogether…

The comrades sent to greet me had the sign for the conference held high, so I spotted it from a good distance away. I relaxed when I saw it. The first words spoken by the first comrade to shake my hand gave me a start: "Say, didn't you run into trouble on the way?"