Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘His father seems unhappy,’ I said, thinking how much the set of Dr Zhang’s mouth resembled Walter’s.

‘Always,’ Dr Yu said, making another face.

Those were the last words Dr Yu and I exchanged alone that night. The four of us sat stiffly in straight chairs, eating dumplings and pressed doufu and the chicken Dr Yu had steamed with soy and ginger, and we talked as if we’d been elected by church committees to demonstrate cultural exchange. Science and daycare and education, all dry as dirt; the weather. The state of the world. My fever seemed to come and go, heat rushing from my feet to my face like a wave and then subsiding, leaving me cold and dry. ‘Women hold up half the world,’ Dr Yu said. ‘That is our slogan. We work the same jobs as men, receive the same money, have the same responsibilities. But somehow all the household chores are also still ours. Is this true for you?’

I rolled my eyes and Dr Zhang sniffed. ‘I have marketed,’ he said. ‘Many times.’

Dr Yu looked at him skeptically and changed the subject to my rehabbing career, not understanding that I’d put it behind me. ‘Re-habbing?’ Dr Zhang said. ‘As in re-habilitation?’

I nodded.

‘We know about rehabilitation,’ he said bitterly. ‘We have been rehabilitated ourselves.’

‘Here?’ I said, misunderstanding him completely.

‘Not here ,’ he said. ‘ Us. Ourselves. What could you do with this place? What could anyone do? And this is an excellent apartment for Beijing, we waited six years for my danwei to assign it to us. Excellent, of course, unless you’re a high Party cadre. You could work for them , perhaps …’

‘What is danwei ?’ I asked.

Dr Zhang scowled. ‘You don’t know danwei ?’ I didn’t; there had been no such thing in Uncle Owen’s time. ‘ Danwei is work unit,’ Dr Zhang continued. ‘In the city, danwei is everything. Not just the working place but more like a village, or a tribe — our food coupons come from our danwei. Our apartment belongs to mine. Our children’s school, permission to marry or move — all is danwei. Danwei is god.’

Rocky interrupted him and said eagerly, ‘You have redone houses? You know about architecture? And art?’ I nodded — at least part of that statement was true — but his father cut us off again.

‘Art?’ Dr Zhang said. ‘We have had no good art for forty years — not since my grandfather’s time.’ He sighed and adjusted his belt. ‘My family were scholars,’ he said. ‘Always. Scholars, teachers, doctors, all in Suzhou. We suffered during the Japanese occupation, and also after Liberation because of our bad class origins, but we struggled hard and I passed the exam to come here to Beijing for medical training.’

He gestured toward his wife. ‘Her family were teachers also. But they supported the Party — her father even came back here from America. And she passed the university exams with high marks, and they took her here also, at Qinghua. We married in 1961, during the famine, after I had already started work as a surgeon and when she graduated and started teaching. But then 1966 came and they decided we were bad — bad families, bad education, bad attitude not with mass line. In 1969 they sent us to Shanxi province for laogai — labor reform. You know about this?’

I nodded. I had heard.

‘We lived in huts. She helped the workers raise pigs. I worked in the brigade clinic, training barefoot doctors. The nurses there, who knew little, made me do cleaning and low work to improve my attitude. No paper, no books, no supplies. No school for our children. Zaofan was six already when we were sent down; Zihong was a baby and Weidong was born there. “Eliminate the four olds,” they said — old ideas, old habits, old customs, old culture. Ha! Almost, they eliminated us. I spent all that time, six years almost, building a memory palace and filling it with all I ever learned. Later, we were rehabilitated — “Sorry,” they said. “We made a mistake. Here is your old life back.” As if it could ever be the same.’

His voice was as dry and cold as if these events had happened to someone else. Rocky had dropped his sunglasses over his eyes as his father spoke, so that no one could read his expression. Dr Yu stared at her hands, which lay quietly in her lap. ‘Noodles,’ she said in a faraway voice. ‘Millet. The Shanxi vinegar was as thick as oil, and it smelled like mold.’ She shuddered and helped herself to more beer and chicken.

I tried to make myself as small as possible, hiding the folds of flesh I’d built with chocolate bars, mashed potatoes, steak, oysters, cake. Dr Zhang, as if reading my shame, pushed the platter of dumplings toward me and raised an eyebrow when I shook my head no. ‘Is this enough for you?’ he asked, his eyes roaming over my bulk. ‘ Meiguo ren — Americans — you are used to different food.’

I changed the subject. ‘What is this memory palace?’ I asked.

Dr Zhang seemed surprised. ‘You’ve never heard of this?’

I shook my head. Dr Zhang looked at his wife and said, ‘You explain it best.’

Dr Yu sighed delicately, the same sort of ladylike puff I often found myself making at home when Walter tried to draw me out during one of our endless faculty dinners. ‘It’s an old idea,’ she said. ‘It was brought to China by a missionary named Li Ma-tou, and passed down and down for the use of students taking examinations. You make a mental picture for each thing you wish to remember, then put each picture in a corner of a room of the building — the palace — you have in your mind. My own mother learned this, in her Catholic school.’

Dr Zhang interrupted his wife and turned to me. ‘You wish to learn?’ he said, with the first spark of interest he’d shown all night. ‘It’s a good way to remember Chinese characters.’

‘Sure,’ I said. Rocky frowned and left the room.

‘Pick a place you know well,’ Dr Zhang said. ‘Any place — only make sure you can see all the rooms and details clear in your mind.’

I closed my eyes and recalled the house I’d grown up in, the one I’d described to Dr Yu. I saw each door and window, each corner and crevice, each cupboard and table and chair.

‘Now,’ Dr Zhang said, ‘you stick pictures of things you want to remember in those places, where your mind can always find them.’ He picked up a book and said, ‘The character for your word book is shu — sounds like English “shoe.” You have a bookshelf in your palace?’

I nodded. In the den where Mumu used to sleep was a small wooden bookcase crammed with her Swedish books.

‘Imagine a shoe, then — a particular shoe, one you like very much. Place this on the bookcase, which is in a particular room. Now, whenever you want to remember the word for “book,” you will go to that bookcase in your mind and always you will see the shu. ’

I wasn’t sure about this, but I smiled as if I understood. I didn’t want to tell him that a good memory wasn’t something I desired. I’d spent years trying to forget all sorts of things.

‘You see the idea,’ Dr Zhang said. ‘It’s a way of holding concepts in your head by making abstractions concrete and arranging them in order.’

‘What did you use for your palace?’ I asked him.

‘My parents’ house,’ he said. ‘They had an old, courtyard-style house, with many rooms and central gardens. You have seen these?’

‘Sort of,’ I said, and Dr Yu smiled at the phrase. ‘Out near the Fragrant Hills Park. There are some like that, but they’ve all been converted to apartments.’

‘When we were young,’ Dr Yu said softly, ‘where we grow up in Suzhou, we have these houses in our families for generations …’