Andrea Barrett: The Middle Kingdom

My thrifty companions bought jade and ivory and lacquer boxes as though there were no tomorrow, but the constant pressure to shop made us all short-tempered. Swiss, German, English, Canadian, American, Italian, French — the foul, polluted air of the city wore us down, and we wheezed and coughed and sneezed in grumpy concert. By the third day, I had a cold that quickly deepened to bronchitis, and something — maybe my rising fever — made me frantic with longing, tense with a desire I didn’t understand. Nine million people around me living wholly different lives, and each time I tried to talk to one of them, Lou hauled me away. He rolled up windows, shut doors, hustled me across roads. He interposed himself between the people and me, and when I complained to Walter, Walter shrugged my words aside.

‘Grace,’ he said impatiently, ‘this isn’t Massachusetts. You go out on your own and you’ll get lost or hurt or in trouble or something …’ He winced when he saw my face and then he spoke again quickly, hoping to distract me from what we both knew he’d meant: the incident in the swamp back home. My proven inability to take care of myself.

‘It’s tough out there,’ he said. ‘That’s all I meant. You don’t understand the language, and it’s a different world — at least it’s comfortable in here.’

But I was tired of comfort. We had comfort at home, comfort in spades, our lives as safe as soap, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in this swirling, gorgeous land lay the life I’d been looking for. I saw it in the children I glimpsed from the windows of our bus, who were so beautiful it pained me to look at them. I saw it in the old men airing their caged birds in the parks, in the girls holding hands on the street, in the students who crowded around Walter. I heard it in the Mandarin that I couldn’t understand, the calls and shouts and trills and whispers, the rising inflections that weren’t questions, the staccato barks that weren’t commands. I felt it in Zillah’s brief reappearance; she’d been missing for twenty-one years.

On our sixth night locked away in the Fragrant Hills, I made a break for it. After dinner, when all the scientists filed into the meeting room for another presentation and all the wives returned to their rooms, I walked out the front door of the hotel and into the surrounding park. Expecting an adventure — a chance meeting with anyone, an overheard conversation, a glimpse through the windows of one of the buildings that lined the bordering road. But the park was closed, the lights were out, and the only sound was the hollow beat of a horse’s hoofs on the packed dirt road. I crept through the shrubs near the locked gate, and I caught a whiff of damp straw, green bamboo, horse manure. When I heard voices, I called ‘ Ni hau ’ into the darkness — hello. Hello, China, I thought. Hello, anyone.

Two men leapt up, terrified, from the pillars they’d been leaning against. They were eighteen or so, boys in uniform, and their English was no better than my Mandarin. They looked at my hair; they looked at each other; they whispered furiously.

‘Where … from! ’ one of them finally said.

I searched my mind for the words for our hotel and came out with Xiangshan fandian. The men whispered to each other.

‘Is un-allowed,’ the short one said, and then they politely, firmly, escorted me back. We had a small scene in the hotel lobby, where an embarrassed Lou vouched for me, and then I slunk off to bed in a storm of frustration.

Walter was furious. ‘I can’t believe you went out there alone,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to get hurt?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but I wasn’t and he knew it. I thought I remembered a time when he might have made the same journey himself. He probably thought he remembered a time when I would have clung closer to him. We lay in our separate beds, the sheets drawn tight as skin, and when I said into the dark silence, ‘You hate me because I’m fat,’ he sniffed and said, ‘I dislike the way you act.’ Which may have been true — we hadn’t made love in months, not since my last day tracking birds in the swamp back home, and in the absence of that connection we’d grown as strange to each other as a raven and a cat.

Our windows opened out to a dark garden arranged in stylized shapes: Pavilion Amidst Spring Greenery, Hibiscus on a Misty Hill, Azure Cloudless Sky. Somewhere a fountain murmured. The smells of trees and bark and wet stones drifted into our room, and in the silence I unwrapped a Hershey bar and fed my heart. By morning we’d decided we weren’t speaking to each other, and we passed burnt toast across the table without a word.

The next night, we marched in silence through the halls of a university on the outskirts of the city, past guards who checked our invitations and into a large, worn lecture room which the science students had hastily decorated. The room had the feel of a high-school gym set up for a senior prom: folding chairs set in uneven rows around the edges, banners draped over tables, streamers and posters tacked to the walls, a piano and some sturdier chain and a few microphones at the front. We were part of a small parade — Walter and me first, ignoring each other, and the others coupled behind us as if heading for an ark. Distinguished scientist, decorative wife, pair after pair; a few unmarried women linked for safety; one anomalous distinguished wife on the arm of her toymaker husband. Almost immediately Walter, guest of honor, was swept toward the front of the improvised banquet hall to be introduced to the Chinese scientists. I was funneled off with the rest of the parade. Chairs had been set for us amidst the sea of our Chinese hosts, all of whom seemed to be talking at once. A forest full of tree frogs, a classroom packed with cats; I couldn’t make out anything and the hot smoky air set me coughing again.

‘ Ni hau, ni hau! ’ said the people as we passed. Hello, hello. I ni-haued back as I had all week and managed a dui bu qi when I stepped on someone’s foot — excuse me. From the man’s startled expression I knew I’d mangled his language again.

Half of Beijing seemed crowded into that room, all of us ricocheting off each other. Feet trod feet, elbows bumped elbows, shoulders and hips and thighs mashed together, glasses crushed noses, jewelry caught sleeves. My sleeves, especially — I was wearing blue, a soft, heavy-weave cotton shift with dolman sleeves and a slit neck that set off my blue eyes and pale hair but could not conceal my size. I was the biggest woman there, and my vast, rippling bulk formed a dam in the river of guests. Chinese men bumped against me like reeds, stood puzzled in the eddy behind my mass, murmured apologies, moved away. I willed myself to stop streaming sweat and found a seat near the edge of our foreigners’ island.

There were three rows of people behind me and one in front. To my left, thirty or forty Chinese scientists whispered together. To my right, Walter sat on a raised seat, his shoulders high above a sea of dark heads. The scientists with whom we traveled were well-enough known, but Walter was the acknowledged leader of the acid-rain world and so the Chinese, sensitive to status, shunned everyone else in his favor. Walter was who they crowded around during coffee breaks; Walter who they introduced to their students and families. On the first day of the meeting they’d fallen silent when Walter stood at the podium in the lecture hall and explained, in his soft voice, how the sulfur dioxide from the coal-burning power plants was killing their lakes.

The Chinese scientists had murmured among themselves then as if Walter were prophesying. I knew how they felt — we’d been married for six years and I’d felt that power before. When Walter explained how the acid rain altered the lakes’ pH, killing first the snails, then the tadpoles, then the bacteria, then the fish, hands shot up and questions flew in frantic, fractured English. Something in Walter’s presentations had always made the possible probable, the probable certain, the future cataclysmic, and I could understand his listeners’ concerns. Walter’s predictions were often right.