Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

Dream Palace

For Dancing.

Band Tonight.

The crowd absorbed us instantly as we walked in. People stared at me, at my clothes and my hair and my size, but their stares weren’t hostile and they drew closer to me as Dr Yu touched my arm and murmured, ‘ Pengyou .’ Friend. Then everyone wanted to dance with me. The first woman who propelled me around the room said my hair was remarkable; several other people said they wanted to practice their English with me. I danced with a little boy, with men old and young, with girls and with women my own age, because that’s the way things were done in that room: everyone danced with everyone. I traded my scarf for a carved wooden comb and my pin for a string of beads. I gave away my pen. I danced until I was breathless, until my feet were sore and my cheeks were red, and as I did I listened to my partners talk. There were a hundred stories in that room, a hundred lives. When the band took a break I bowed to my last partner and ran over to Dr Yu.

‘You are liking this,’ she said, laughing at my flushed cheeks and disheveled clothes.

‘I love this,’ I said. ‘I like the music. I like the people. I like what this place is called.’

She smiled. ‘It has a good name,’ she said. ‘Since its new opening. In 1983, when the government tightened again, this room was closed for two months for weakening the spirit of revolution among the people. And all of us thought, oh, the bad times are happening again. But they were not. When this room opened again, the group which runs it said its existence was only a dream, that it flowers between one conservative movement and the next. And so the name.’

‘Well, it fits,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’ve been in palaces all day. You know, Walter and Katherine and Quentin and I spent the afternoon at the Summer Palace. That’s where I figured out what was going on.’

‘You didn’t tell me that,’ Dr Yu said. ‘There is a story from that place for you, which I have been meaning to tell you. Did you see the building at the top of the hill near the lake? The one called the Temple of the Sea of Wisdom?’

‘Just from a distance,’ I said.

‘Not much is left there to look at now. But inside that building, before the blood years, were three big golden Buddhas — one in the center, almost two stories high, and two others, a little smaller, on either side. In tradition, the one in the center represents the present. Those to the left and right represent the past and the future.’

‘One is like your husband,’ I said. ‘Always dreaming of the past.’

‘You could say this,’ she said. ‘And the other is like I am sometimes, and also I think you — always dreaming of the future. Sometimes when I was working with the pigs in the country, I would have such visions of what I wanted that I could see nothing before me.’

‘Your palace of dreams?’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

She nodded. ‘All the time I was in the country, I dreamed of a five-room apartment bordering Beida, overlooking the Lake with No Name. There, rather than Qinghua, because then I thought I never wanted to return to where I had been. In this place was a room for me, a room for Meng, a room for my children to share when they were home from school. Also a living room with bookshelves, in which were all my books and those of Meng and my parents, which were destroyed by the Red Guards. I dreamed a desk near the window, and a soft chair like that one in your hotel room. Actually, I dreamed exactly that chair.’

She paused and then shrugged. ‘Chair is chair, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Especially here. Anyway, I dreamed time, space, books, light. Privacy. A smile on Meng’s face. Also maybe some small land in the Western Hills with a vegetable plot and some hens.’

‘That’s a pretty reasonable dream,’ I said.

‘But this is my point — there is no such thing. Even Marx says you cannot choose your dreams. What you wish for is determined by who you are, what life you come from. But you can choose how you act, how you live.’

She bought two bottles of orange soda from a little boy who approached us, and then she continued. ‘These Buddhas on the hill, they were destroyed many years ago by the Red Guards, and all the bronze was melted down to make things useful for the people. I never saw them, but the story is that the Red Guards broke the left-side Buddha first, the one representing the past, because that was their job. Destroy the four olds, eliminate the past. They cracked that Buddha into small pieces and carted the pieces away. But when they returned, there was discussion over which of the others to take next. Which sequence was more politically correct? One boy said that to destroy the future is to make the present hopeless, so they should take the middle statue first, leaving the future to stand briefly alone. China is a country of the future, he said. The future is progress. China must move ahead.

‘But another girl, she said no. She said that to destroy the present instantly destroys also the future, and that they must take the right-side statue and leave the center one, at least for one minute, alone. That way, she said, they would ensure that the present always exists, and a present always existing in the end is all things. And she won, or so the story goes, and for a few hours that central Buddha sat in the temple alone.’

The band started up again, and while I puzzled over Dr Yu’s words she took my hand and spun me out in a waltz before anyone else could claim me.

‘What I mean,’ she said, as we twirled over the floor, ‘what I mean is that a middle way is sometimes best. Not too much looking back. Not too much dreaming ahead. Time you spend in the past and future is time you spend alone. But between them is a middle kingdom, both feet planted here.’

The floor was filled with dancers now, all of us moving through the small lozenges of light cast by the mirror ball. Faces lit up and vanished and reappeared, and I saw a small, dark shadow flitting through the bodies, darting between the elbows and knees. A slight figure, short and airy; a nine-year-old girl sprouting leathery wings — Zillah. You’ll have a boy , Zillah said to me. With hair like Rocky’s.

‘What?’ I said out loud. I turned my head, but Zillah’s shadow was gone and all I could see were my dancing neighbors.

‘I’m right here,’ Dr Yu said, pressing her hand against mine. ‘Move your feet like this.’

You’ll have a girl, I remembered my mother-in-law telling me, years ago. With hair like yours. Then I remembered the pain I’d felt the night I spent with Rocky, that sharp click as the egg in my ovary had tumbled into its waiting nest. Was that possible? That Rocky had touched that egg, that the few hours we’d spent together should have been just the right few hours? I carried his blood in me, and Dr Yu’s and her husband’s and their dreams and their memories, as well as those of my parents and Mumu and Uncle Owen, and Dr Yu’s father who’d died in Shanghai, and my own and others I didn’t know but couldn’t deny.

Dr Yu led me around in a fancy turn, and as she steered me into a square of light I said, ‘You know, I think I might be pregnant.’

‘I know,’ she said, and the smile she gave me was so complex that I couldn’t tell if she’d be surprised when she first saw the face of my child. I still hadn’t discovered all Dr Yu had told me during my lost week; I still didn’t know all I’d told her. But now we had some time to sort it out. We joined ourselves to the back of a conga line that was circling the room, and as we did I thought I saw Zillah’s shadow again, dancing at the head of the line with her feet several inches above the ground and her wings outspread.