Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

Dr Yu inspected everything as we made our way between the stalls, naming what she touched for me. Zhusun , bamboo shoots; qiezi , eggplant; doufu , beancurd. The steamed buns were baozi and the duck, ya. I drew the words in happily but knew I’d lose most of them. Dr Yu explored four of the chickens, her hands pressing the breasts and thighs and checking the beaks and combs before she chose the fattest one. She paid with a handful of bills a third the size of my solemn Foreign Exchange Currency — tiny green notes printed with ships, even smaller mustard ones depicting trucks loaded with grain, misty mint ones bearing giant bridges. ‘ Renmibi ,’ she explained — the money Lou had forbidden us to have. ‘Peoples’ Money.’ She stuffed the newspaper-wrapped chicken under her arm.

‘We are here,’ she said, pointing at a cluster of six pale green, ten-story, cement-block buildings. She showed me the cluster’s coal-burning heating plant and its mountain of coal, as well as the primary school and the series of low bicycle sheds packed with identical bikes. But because she explained none of it, doing me the honor of acting as though I could understand what I saw, my head filled with questions as we climbed the unlit stairwell to her sixth-floor flat.

Dr Yu’s husband was waiting for us inside the living room, hunched on a narrow couch and watching TV while his oldest son read. Both of them stood when Dr Yu brought me in. She said something quick in Mandarin and then she turned to me and said, ‘I present my husband, Dr Zhang Meng. Also my oldest son, Zhang Zaofan. Zaofan in your language means “Rebel.”’ I smiled and she turned to her family. ‘Meet Grace Hoffmeier,’ she said. ‘Wife of famous lake ecologist Doctor Professor Walter Hoffmeier.’

I nodded, although I didn’t like being introduced as Walter’s wife. The elder Zhang bowed. ‘So pleased,’ he said dryly. ‘Your husband’s work is well known to my wife.’ Before I could respond, he gestured at the battered wardrobe, the sagging couch, the scarred table holding up the small black-and-white TV. ‘You will excuse our furnishings,’ he said. ‘All things of worth were taken from us. My father’s books, his scrolls …’ He shrugged. ‘It’s an old story,’ he said. ‘Same old story you hear from everyone.’

He wore his gray pants belted high over a small round stomach, which seemed to stem more from his horrible posture than from any excess weight. His worn white shirt had a frayed collar, and his shoes were laced so tightly that I wondered if they weren’t a size too big. His eyes were deep-set, sunk in a nest of wrinkles, and they kept sliding to my hair. When I coughed, they shifted to my chest.

‘Bronchitis,’ I explained.

‘At least,’ he said. ‘At least. You should go to the doctor tomorrow if you’re not better — you know where Clinic for Foreign Visitors is?’

I shook my head and coughed again.

‘You go,’ he said, scribbling the address on a scrap of paper. ‘Call me if you have any trouble. I work in the hospital wing next door.’

‘You’re a medical doctor?’ I asked, and then I remembered Dr Yu had told me this at the party and that in fact she’d offered to have her husband fix my cough. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I knew that. It’s just this fever, I’ve been confused …’

‘Thoracic surgeon,’ Dr Zhang said shortly. ‘This year, at least.’ He pursed his lips and, in a mincing voice said, ‘Is new Central Committee policy now: “Intellectuals are to be esteemed and treated as valuable.”’ He sounded as if he were quoting someone he didn’t much like.

I stammered something clumsy and then turned toward the younger Zhang, who’d been waiting silently while his father spoke. Zaofan made me forget my cough and my discomfort with his father — in that tiny, shabby room, he stood out like a rhododendron. He was as beautiful as Randy, my first husband; as beautiful as Walter’s student who’d caused me all that trouble back home. He was as beautiful as any man I’d ever seen, and when he smiled I forgot my bronchitis, my weight, and my foreign face and I felt beautiful too. Voluptuous, not fat; smooth and expansive and well-tended and creamy-skinned. I forgot how I was supposed to act. I was middle-aged, I reminded myself. I’d been married for six years. The back of my neck began to sweat.

Zaofan’s hair was long, held back by dark glasses, and he was dressed in jeans and a tight blue T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘Chongqing Construction Company — More, Better, Faster.’ A huge digital watch adorned his wrist. In Massachusetts, he would have looked hoody, but here I knew his appearance meant only that he was young, that he leaned toward Western ideas; that he was, or had been, a student. I’d seen thousands of young men dressed like him on the streets and the campuses. None of them had had Zaofan’s startling eyes or elegant bones, but many had shared his aura of eagerness.

He held out his hand and said, ‘Call me Rocky — my American name.’ His voice was surprisingly deep.

I said hello and touched his hand, and when I did my palm sprouted sweat like a sponge. His hand was square, broad-palmed, strongly lined, with large, curved nails; despite the film of sweat between us he held me firmly.

Dr Zhang cleared his throat and frowned. ‘Zaofan is waiting-for-employment,’ he said. ‘That’s what we call it here, when students leave school and then wait and wait to be assigned to a job that never appears. He has made a small business selling jeans, radios, cigarettes on the street; he makes more money than we, his parents. All illegal. His friends, those liumang — they are profiteers. Petty thieves.’

‘What should I do?’ Rocky said. ‘What else is there for me?’ He squeezed my hand before he let it go, and in an echo of his father’s mocking voice he said, ‘Some must get rich first. That’s the new party line.’

‘That’s the current wind,’ his father said bitterly. ‘You should be less like tree, more like bamboo. The wind now is just like it was in the early sixties — free markets, individual contracts, go-it-alone. But a new wind can come, as winds did then. Even a new Gang of Four … you wait. Old Deng is so old his brain has turned to stone.’

Rocky shrugged as if he’d heard all this before, and Dr Yu smiled nervously. They might have been any family back home, the anxious parents of one of the boys I’d hung out with when I was fat and dressed in black and was everybody’s bad girl. Rocky shot me a small, conspiratorial smile, which I tried not to return but did. ‘ Liumang ,’ he said to me. ‘Means hoodlum. You like what my father calls me?’

Dr Yu, who’d been watching all this, tugged me into the kitchen. No bigger than a closet, it had gray, unpainted concrete floors and blue-painted concrete walls. A small wooden refrigerator was jammed next to the sink, beneath a pair of rude cupboards. She unwrapped the chicken she’d bought and placed it, head and beak and all, in a covered wok. Then she opened a bottle of beer and poured it into two heavy glasses. ‘Do not mind Zaofan,’ she said, gulping at her beer. ‘He is — what do you say? — in a stage right now.’

‘I don’t mind him at all,’ I said. My left hand found its way to my right arm, which felt hot. I stroked the skin above my elbow as if I could stroke my fever down, and Zillah with it. ‘He’s charming,’ I said to Dr Yu. ‘Your son, I mean. He seems very bright.’

She made a wry face. ‘He likes all things American,’ she said. ‘Music, dance, sunglasses, art. All he knows of politics is the Cultural Revolution — bad times, bad food, no school, struggle sessions. Political education meetings every day. Everything is bad for him because of us. He got in some trouble selling dried sweet-potato slices he appropriated, perhaps without full permission. Also a few things later on. Now the art school refuses him because of his record, and so he has to work at this odd job. He makes his father unhappy.’