Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

In front of us were several tables of high-ranking Chinese scientists and Party leaders, and Dr Yu pointed some of them out to me. ‘President of Beijing University,’ she murmured. ‘President of Qinghua, vice president of Chinese Association for Science and Technology, head of Chinese Academy of Sciences — and there, over there to the left, those are scientists visiting from Shanghai for special study.’

‘It’s so amazing,’ I said. ‘For me to be here at this …’

One of the scientists proposed a toast, and then another. The waiter refilled our glasses. Dr Yu said, ‘It is amazing for me also, to be here.’

‘Yes?’

‘Very much,’ she said. ‘I was here in Beijing when this building was made. In 1959 — everything still seemed so hopeful then. Our fathers both had escaped somehow the Anti-Rightist campaign in ’57, even though many scholars were punished then. And so Meng and I were able to go to university, as we wished, and help build socialism. Serve the country. Serve the people. When the huge harvest of ’58 came, our classes were canceled and all of us, we went on buses to the countryside to help. We lived in tents. We did not mind the work. We sang, danced, gathered crops. We felt like part of our own country.’

‘That sounds wonderful,’ I said, reminded of my early days with Walter. Dr Yu’s voice had a wistfulness I could recognize.

‘It was,’ she said. ‘It was almost the last time like that we had. The weather changed the next year and then the famine began — you know about this? The three bad years?’

I shook my head, although it didn’t sound completely unfamiliar. Her words came to me as if I’d heard them before, vaguely, in a dream.

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘Only now do people begin to admit what happened then. Everyone was hungry. Everyone. In the city, here, we received one-half pound of grain each day, no salt, no fat, no meat, no vegetables. We ate bark we scraped from trees and boiled. Also leaves and wild herbs. In the countryside, where two of my brothers were, they ate ground-up cornstalks and sorghum stems and bark and roots.’

She ate steadily as she spoke, her chopsticks moving quickly from the platters to her plate to her mouth. Our waiter brought dish after dish and kept our glasses full, and I concentrated all my attention on Dr Yu’s voice. Some of what she was saying sounded familiar to me.

‘You have known famine?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But sometimes I’ve eaten to fill up what seems empty, like you’d drink hot water to fill your stomach when you couldn’t get anything else. It’s just as useless, but that’s how I got this big.’

‘I must tell Meng,’ Dr Yu said thoughtfully. ‘You have eaten from sadness?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Meng thought you had thyroid disease.’

We both smiled, and Katherine looked up at us before she returned her attention to Walter. Dr Yu pulled the red-cooked chicken over and then she continued talking. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Some people blamed the weather for this famine. Some blamed Mao and the Great Leap Forward. But still we were very idealistic, and we finished our studies and became married and thought, now our lives are really beginning. I was so proud to stay and teach at Qinghua, such a place of prestige. But of course, Qinghua — there was the start, practically, of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. So soon, almost immediately, the president of the university was overthrown, and then all rightist elements and bourgeois academic authorities and also those they call “escaped from the net,” which included me. Immediately my father was attacked because of his foreign training — they said he colluded with reactionaries, secret agents, and cultural imperialists. They said his body was saturated with evil germs of the bourgeoisie, as old meat is with disease.’

She caught her breath and quickly ate some prawns in bean sauce. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I told you this part before. The Red Guards came, they locked him up, they paraded him around Shanghai, he died.’

‘I remember this,’ I said. ‘I remember some of this.’

She hardly heard me. She snipped at her food with her chopsticks while she decided what to say next. She plucked and chewed and spoke again, swallowing quickly.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, then — once my father was taken, all was over for me. He has escaped the net, they said; he should have been reformed in the fifties. They will not make this mistake with me. I am contaminated. I am from a hopelessly bad class background. A dragon is born of a dragon, a phoenix is born of a phoenix, and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in the wall — that is what they told me. So I was guilty, Meng was guilty, our children — only two of them were born then, Zaofan and Zihong — they were guilty from birth because of us. Things were done to us, and to many others. Our jobs were taken.’

‘And your salaries,’ I said.

‘And we were struggled against daily,’ she said, nodding with approval. ‘In the lake at Beida, the beautiful lake you passed the night we met, floated new bodies every day of the suicides. People we knew. At Meng’s hospital, the doctors were made to work as orderlies, cleaning latrines and changing sheets, while the nurses and orderlies pretended to be doctors.’

‘And then you were sent to the country,’ I said. ‘For labor reform. And your sister was removed from the Ministry because of her connection to you, and the school where your mother taught was burned to the ground.’ I could have gone on; suddenly I felt like I knew the outlines of her life. Certain scenes lay before me as clearly as the ones Zillah had brought to my long sleep, and I knew then that I’d heard two voices and both of them were real.

She looked at me. ‘You were listening,’ she said, and then she smiled broadly. ‘You heard me!’

‘I must have,’ I said. ‘But we don’t have to talk about this. I hate for you to be upset.’

‘I am not upset!’ she said. James and Quentin and Walter and Katherine all looked up then, but they were hypnotized, they were sheep, they were as stunned as if a spell had been cast on them. They were in love, two by two; if I hadn’t known it before I knew it then. Once I’d stood like that next to Jim, Page’s boyfriend, and had felt my feet moving his way as if my toes had minds of their own. Once, on a stony hillside, my leg had eased toward Hank’s thigh. And I had felt like that once toward Randy and maybe even toward Walter, and during none of those times had I been able to see the world around me. A child could have starved in front of me during those white flashes and I wouldn’t have noticed, any more than those two hypnotized couples noticed Dr Yu. They registered the click of her chopsticks, the rise in her voice, and then they forgot.

‘I am not upset,’ Dr Yu repeated. She leaned back in her chair and breathed deeply through her nose, and then she emptied her glass. ‘Of course I’m upset,’ she said, more quietly. ‘See what I mean? You think of these things from the past all the time, you press them to you as Meng does, living again and again each thing — of course you become upset. You become upset if the things remembered are bad, and you become distracted from your own life if the things you remember are good.’

She paused. Dr Shen, who had been watching her curiously for some time, leaned over and spoke to her softly in Mandarin. She nodded rapidly and held her hand out to him, palm up. ‘It is fine,’ she said to him in English. ‘It is fine. She is my friend. She knows of my life.’

Dr Shen looked at me gravely and inclined his head in a small bow. Dr Yu touched the back of my hand lightly with one finger.