Andrea Barrett: The Middle Kingdom

We flew from Japan to Beijing on a CAAC flight, and it was then that Zillah’s voice came back to me. The flight attendents wore blue pants and tight-buttoned jackets and open sandals, and because they couldn’t speak English they greeted us with a videotape instead. The picture was grainy and the background music wavered and crashed.

The English title flickered, pale and ghostly, along the screen: In-Flight Annunciation, I read. The annunciations I knew about were the sort where the angel Gabriel comes, pronouncements are made, preparations undertaken. Voices are heard and taken seriously.

Pay attention , Zillah said.

I didn’t recognize her at first. I jumped and looked at the cabin attendant, wondering where she’d found that English phrase, but she looked at me blankly and gestured toward the screen. ‘For complete personal safeness,’ the next line read, ‘all lap belts securely fasten please.’

I took the warning seriously. I fastened my seat belt so tightly I nearly cut myself in half, and still I was so scared by our jerky, hesitant flight that I added another tranquilizer to the pair I’d swallowed at the airport in Japan. When the cabin pressure dropped over the Yellow Sea and the crew rushed down the aisle to pound the plane’s rear door and make sure the seal was set, I took another pill and then I heard Zillah again.

Don’t worry , she said. You’re safe. Remember the day we tried to fly?

This time I knew who she was, and I acted accordingly. I shut my ears, I threw her out of my mind. I pushed her back to that place where I’d pushed everything for years. And I succeeded; we overshot the runway in Beijing twice, and by the time we landed I had driven Zillah away. That was how I existed then: push, shut, close, seal, deny, forget. Forget. My heart was a palace of sealed rooms and my mind was a wasteland of facts. I walked off the plane, shaken and limp, and entered a cold gray building dimly lit by unshaded bulbs. Men in green uniforms stood by the walls and stared.

I stared back. I had a phrasebook with me, full of sentences meant to be used in places like this, but when I looked at the words they seemed hopelessly strange. I turned toward my husband, Walter Hoffmeier, hoping that he’d take care of things. But Walter wasn’t there.

In the absence of someone to greet us Walter had taken charge of our group, lining us up, finding our baggage, assembling documents and patiently explaining who we were and what we were doing there. ‘International Conference on the Effects of Acid Rain,’ he repeated, enunciating clearly. The puzzled customs officials shook their heads. Fifty Western biologists, experts on the effects of acid rain, come to meet with a hundred Chinese biologists in a country with the worst acid-rain problem in the world. Walter had visions of international cooperation, economic reform, restored ecological balances; and behind him, like an army, stood synecologists studying woodland microclimates, ichthyologists studying trout, geologists mapping the bedrock’s differential weathering, and botanists analyzing ancient pollen, not to mention the limnologists, the entomologists, the invertebrate zoologists, and all those whom the Chinese politely referred to as ‘accompanying persons,’ but who were, with two exceptions, wives. Tired wives, our voices shrill with jet lag and the rocky flight.

Our dresses were rumpled, our hair was mussed. Eyes kept sliding toward us. I felt like a cross between a goddess and a whale — a goddess for my long, straight, pale-blond hair, which was streaming down my back in wild disorder, and a whale for my astonishing size. I’d gained thirty pounds in the past nine months and hadn’t been so heavy since I was sixteen. My arms quivered when I moved, and in that room full of short, slight men I felt as conspicuous as if I’d sprouted another head.

‘Any radios?’ the officials asked. ‘Any cameras, watches, calculators? All must come out which goes in.’

We listed our goods and promised not to sell them and cleared the last booth, and when we did we saw a small man waving a cardboard sign embossed with the name of our conference. We’d missed him; to our stupid eyes he’d looked like everyone else. He’d been waiting for us all along.

‘Liu Shangshu,’ the man said, pointing to himself and then pumping Walter’s arm. ‘You call me Lou, okay? I am assigned to you, from Chinese Association for Science and Technology. Your host unit. Anything you want, you ask me.’

And with that he herded us into a tiny bus and we headed for the Xiangshan Hotel in the Fragrant Hills. The hotel was half an hour northwest of Beijing, and I peered through the narrow bus windows as we rode into the city and out the other side, past block after block of concrete apartment buildings. Most of the roads had no streetlights and the city stretched dark and secret around us. The road narrowed to two lanes as we turned north, and the driver dodged platoons of bicycles that rose from the darkness like ghosts.

‘Five million bicycles here,’ Lou said, answering someone’s startled question. ‘Maybe six. Is crowded city.’

It was. We flew ignorant and air-conditioned through a dense mist of life, our headlights shining on horse-drawn wagons piled with hay and sometimes crowned with a tired person or two, small carts pulled by tricycles, rivers of people walking quietly toward unknown destinations. A man dangled a white goose from a basket on his handlebars. In the open back of an old truck, two camels stood placidly. The fields beyond the road were flat and planted with something tall, which might have been corn. Camels belonged in the desert, I thought. Corn belonged at home. I had no idea what belonged in China.

Farther out, the road was under construction, and men stripped to the waist stood shoulder-high in ditches lit by gas flares. Digging, lifting out stones, laying in drainage pipe — it was almost midnight, and when our bus passed by, the workers pointed and smiled and spoke to us. I pulled down my window to listen to them, but Lou reached over and pulled it back up.

‘Please,’ he said reproachfully. ‘Will be more comfortable with windows closed , air-cooling on .’

I got a whiff of the countryside and then it was gone. The road narrowed further and the traffic thinned as we entered the silent hills and finally came upon our hotel, which was white and set in a pool of light behind a tall metal fence. We’d been traveling for thirty-six hours and were frightened and weary and hungry and sore, and the sight of the glassed-in central atrium and jutting wings seemed pleasing at first, walling us off from everything. The night clerk was asleep when we entered, and the porters snoozed on straight-backed chairs. Lou moved like a sheepdog, herding us toward the desk.

My first week in China I saw almost nothing and misread everything I saw. I’d come reluctantly, although this trip had once been a dream of mine — events at home had left me sick and depressed and unreceptive, and it wasn’t until I first saw Beijing that something opened in me. Then I grew anxious to look, and then frustrated when I couldn’t; I couldn’t escape the hotel except in the company of Lou and the other wives. Around me were wind and dust and constant construction; pleated slipcovers that rendered the furniture female and squat; warm beer and flat orange soda and the thick smell of Chinese cigarettes; plants I couldn’t name and food I couldn’t recognize. Modern office buildings went up inside shells of hand-tied bamboo scaffolding: a picture any tourist might have taken; while inside a life I couldn’t imagine and yet yearned to enter went on without me.

Walter and his colleagues met with the Chinese scientists all day, every day, in a huge auditorium hung with banners and studded with microphones. He talked and arranged informal classes and paired his Western colleagues with Chinese scientists who had similar interests. He never left the hotel and I almost never saw him. I was packed in a minibus each morning with the other wives and taken on whirlwind tours of the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Mao Zedong Mausoleum; I never took pictures because the images were frozen on postcards everywhere. We spent an hour or two at each sight before Lou herded us into the nearby Friendship Store, where goods the Chinese wanted but couldn’t have were exchanged for our precious foreign currency. Outside each Friendship Store, men with hooded eyes slunk past us. ‘Change money,’ they whispered. ‘Change money?’ Our pockets were stuffed with the crisp colored bills called FEC — Foreign Exchange Currency, not really money but tokens that allowed us to shop in the special stores and stay in our special hotels. Real money was forbidden to us; Lou chased the black marketers away.