Andrea Barrett: The Middle Kingdom

‘Jody,’ I said. ‘I know.’

He’d been sleeping, but he woke when he heard his name — my son, whose second birthday had fallen on Friday, before our world collapsed. ‘ Muqin,’ he said then, smiling at me sleepily. Mother. He knew as many words in Mandarin as he did in English.

‘ Juehan,’ Wenwen said, which was what she and the others called Jody — a rough translation of John, as close as we could get. Wenwen kissed Jody and me good-bye and we promised to keep in touch, although neither of us knew how we’d manage that.

‘You’ll go?’ she asked.

‘I’ll see,’ I said. ‘I have to find Xiaomin, first.’ We said good-bye again, and then I gave Wenwen most of the money I had and watched as she made her way from the building and through the crowd below.

I took my passport, a few clothes, some food for Jody; Jody’s passport and birth certificate, which Xiaomin and her husband had helped me get from the US Embassy a few days after Jody’s birth; and the contraption I used to carry Jody on my back. I left everything else behind — I still thought I might be coming back — and then I closed the door to the tiny room that Jody and I had shared, which despite its size had been luxurious compared to the dorms where the students piled four or six to a room. From the window in the stairwell I saw four trucks filled with soldiers head for the main courtyard. I moved the sheaf of Chinese documents that certified my right to be here, to teach, to live, from my bag to my jacket pocket, and then I ran down the stairs and headed for my bicycle. And then I turned around, spinning so sharply that Jody, on my back, giggled and cried, ‘Horsey!’

I raced around the building toward our lab. Jody had his hands on my shoulders, and he greeted every person we passed with high-pitched cries of ‘ ni hau! ’ — hello. People who hadn’t smiled in days smiled at him, at me, as they had since the day I’d first brought him here — he was something of a mascot, at least in the science wing, and in better days he’d been much fussed over in the nursery. ‘ Ni hau , Grace,’ my colleagues said, after they’d smiled at Jody, and I tried to slow my steps and respond to them. But they were moving quickly too. Their greetings came to us from heads turned over their shoulders as their bodies rushed away, and my responses trailed me like a tail.

The lab door was open, but no one was inside. The long wooden table was littered with equipment from the experiments we’d been running before the demonstrations. The pH meter a scientist visiting from California had brought, the micropipette and the precious pipette tips I’d had Page send me from Massachusetts, the jars full of lake water, the dissecting trays, the slides and the workbooks and the stained filters and nets — all Xiaomin and I had worked so hard to assemble.

‘ Yu! ’ Jody called, tugging at my hair. Fish. Along the wall the fish we’d kept as live specimens were still moving in slow circles through their murky tanks.

In the bottom drawer of Xiaomin’s desk were the notebooks we’d kept for our project, and drafts of several papers we hadn’t completed. Everything else in the lab could be replaced but these, the only records of our attempt to map the populations of the lake we’d studied in the Western Hills. A simple project — I’d worked on one similar to it when I was a student in Massachusetts, but then it hadn’t meant anything to me. Then it had all been tied up with Walter, who had been my advisor; and after we got married I’d come to find the work tiresome and unimportant. But here I’d found the students’ enthusiasm contagious, and I’d worked late into the night, trying to learn enough to stay ahead of them.

I slid the notebooks into the sack that held Jody, so that they were pressed between my back and his clinging chest. I fed the fish and stowed what I could in the cupboards, and then I tore off again and mounted my bicycle and pedaled along the edge of campus toward the north gate. Jianming had said that most of the fighting was concentrated along Changan Avenue and the areas south of it, and so I planned a circular, northern route. East on East Qinghua Road, I decided, studying my city map; and then south on Changping, east on Deshengmen, and south at the Lama Temple on Dongsi, which would turn into Dongdan and drop us — unnoticed, I hoped — east of Tiananmen Square and north of Changan, at the hospital where Xiaomin’s husband worked.

Jody fell asleep on my back as I pedaled through the heat of the afternoon. Things were quiet up here, and the fields stretching along the road were green and soft. Only when we approached the northern end of Beihai Park did I begin to hear the occasional distant pop of gunfire. Jody woke up and tickled the back of my neck. I sang him a couple of songs. The soft popping might have been fireworks, rising into the air to celebrate a new year. The streets were empty, which seemed even eerier than it would have in Boston or New York; I’d grown used to bicycling as part of a moving wave of people, a particle massed so closely with the others that I almost didn’t have to steer.

When we turned down Dongsi we began to see people again, clustered in knots around the posters and photographs pasted on trees and poles. They were crying, shouting, reading the posters out loud. I passed a burned-out bus and then a group of grim soldiers clearing away a heap of rubble at an intersection. The soldiers looked at us but didn’t stop us; maybe Jody’s smile disarmed them. I pedaled faster, toward the noise and smoke, and finally reached the gate to the hospital. The soldiers stopped me there.

‘No admittance,’ one of them said to me. We spoke in his language, which had become one of mine. ‘And you are forbidden to be on the streets. Please return to your place of residence.’

‘My baby is sick,’ I said, but Jody, no help at all, reached for the soldier’s cap and laughed.

‘Not sick,’ the soldier said. ‘Go home.’

‘He has asthma,’ I lied. ‘His medicine is all gone. I have to get some before tomorrow, or he’ll be sick.’

Jody parroted me. ‘ You qichuan bing ,’ he said gaily. Asthma. His accent was better than mine.

Despite himself, the soldier smiled. And then he looked at Jody’s hair and eyes, which were nothing like mine. ‘Chinese baby?’ he said. ‘Speaks Chinese.’

‘He’s very smart,’ I said. ‘He learned from our neighbors.’

‘Nay-boors,’ Jody said in English.

‘Let her go in,’ the other soldier said. ‘The doctors are very busy, but maybe you will find someone to help you.’

They let me pass, and in a second we were in. I threw my bike on the ground and ran up the steps.

It took me twenty minutes to find Xiaomin, and in that time I saw more than I’d ever wanted to of what had been going on. Worse than Jianming had said, worse than the rumors we’d heard — I took Jody off my back and pressed him to my chest, both to shield him from the sights and to comfort myself with his flesh. There were people everywhere, in the lobby, the halls, the rooms, on the stairs, people lying on the doors and planks on which they’d been carried in, people draped across chairs and on the dirty floor. Some were unconscious. Some groaned and bled. Some, who’d been treated already, lay on make-shift pallets and beds outside the overflowing rooms. Others were dead.

A medical student pulled me away from the door I’d opened, which led into a room packed with shrouded bodies. ‘The morgue is full,’ he said tightly. ‘Everyplace is full.’ And then he looked at my face again, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Why are you here?’

Jody started crying; he’d caught my terror by then and was wailing and kicking in my arms, screaming at me to put him down. The medical student reached for him. ‘Is he hurt?’ he said. ‘Even little babies …’