The Middle Kingdom

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.

Walter stroked his nose as a small man with an overbite introduced him in Mandarin. I heard the name of the university where we were; I heard Hoff-er-meierr; I heard some astonishing polysyllabic that may have been the Chinese rendering of Quabbin Reservoir, where Walter had done his first, best work. That was all I could catch – despite my best efforts with my great-uncle Owen’s old language books and the new ones I’d bought, I’d learned hardly any Mandarin. All week long, listening to the crowds, I’d heard only a rising, falling, yowling sound, like a river tumbling over broken glass. When I’d struggled to respond with a few words, everyone had laughed.

As the small man rattled on I scanned the room. Food, great lovely heaps of it; I’d been starving all week. The table to my left was crowded with bottles of sweet pink wine, which women in homemade jumpers were pouring into glasses for a toast. The table to my right was dotted with large green bottles of beer and smaller ones of orange soda. The table directly in front of me was spread with food, dish after dish, and behind a whole fish drenched in brown sauce I saw a chocolate layer cake on which my name was written in icing. How had they known? I looked again – the icing said ‘Greetings,’ not ‘Grace.’ Across the room, the small man sat down and a pretty young woman moved to the microphone and clapped her hands twice. The shrieking and laughing and chattering stopped as if she’d thrown a switch.

‘I would like to make a toast, please,’ said the woman in her careful English. She rolled her Rs with a Beijing buzz, almost a Scottish burr. ‘To our var-ry distinguished guest of honor, var-ry far-murz Doctor Professor Wal-ter Hoff-er-meierr.’

Everyone stood and clapped and cheered. Walter bowed and gave a speech, while I sat on my folding chair and felt my thighs overrunning the seat like a river. The head of the university spoke, some government official spoke, a visitor from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology spoke – all spoke and offered toasts, while I kept my eye on the chocolate cake. Someone kept filling my glass with sweet pink wine, and I didn’t notice until the third or fourth toast that I was the only one draining my glass each time. I think I already had the fever then.

‘Doctor Professor Hoff-er-meierr has agreed to allow pictures,’ the young woman said. A tidal wave of students and scientists flowed around and between the tables, leaving me more or less to myself. The German couple behind me mumbled; the Belgians talked to the Swiss. A young man with a bushy gold moustache was nattering on about some limnological problem. Katherine Olmand, a British ichthyologist I’d come to dislike for her prim aloofness, spoke to one of the waitresses in Mandarin and watched to make sure the rest of us had noticed. One Chinese woman sat alone, a few feet to my left; she exchanged a few phrases with Katherine and then with another woman scientist, but didn’t seem able to strike up a lasting conversation with either of them. When she saw me watching her, she slid across the folding chairs and smiled nervously.

‘Good evening,’ she said, with a heavy accent. ‘I may practice my English with you?’

‘Of course,’ I said, wondering if this was how she’d approached the other women. I was lonely enough to want a conversation with anyone, and I was also flattered. At the meeting, the Chinese usually shunned me in favor of Walter.

‘Dr Yu Xiaomin,’ she said, tapping her chest. She had a small, sweet, delicate face, finely creased about the eyes. Her blouse was dove-colored silk, figured with small birds; her skirt was tan and apparently homemade. Her stockings were flesh colored and almost opaque and her shoes, black and clunky, might have come from my grandmother Mumu’s closet. But she wasn’t old – she was forty, maybe forty-five, no older than Walter.

‘I am a lake ecologist, like your husband,’ Dr Yu said. A worried look crossed her face. ‘Walter Hoffmeier is your husband?’

‘He is,’ I agreed.

‘Mrs Walter Hoffmeier, then,’ she said. Her temples were damp, and I suddenly realized she was too shy to fight the crowd surrounding Walter and so had settled for the two women near me, and finally for me instead. I felt mildly insulted to be her last choice, but my curiosity was stronger than my hurt pride and I had no one else to talk to.

‘Grace Hoffmeier,’ I said. ‘I used to be a lake ecologist too. Sort of.’

‘Yes?’ Dr Yu said. Her face relaxed. ‘What does that mean, “sort of”?’

‘I worked as my husband’s assistant,’ I told her. ‘Years ago. Helped with his projects, gathered data, drafted papers …’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Dr Yu said, nodding energetically. ‘That is nice for a wife. You have children?’

I fell into a fit of coughing and then said, ‘No.’ How had we gotten so personal, so fast? I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and there seemed to be no point in telling her the whole history of our not having children, no point in going into who was to blame and why.

Dr Yu’s face fell and I softened my answer. ‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘No?’ she said. ‘You’re so young, you could have many …’

‘Not so young,’ I told her. ‘Thirty. How about you? Do you have children?’

‘Three,’ she said proudly. ‘Two boys and a girl – was before the rule of one child only. Do you know this rule? My father had ten children, but now …’

‘Sure I know it,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to miss.’ All over Beijing, I’d seen posters exhorting couples to sign the one-child pledge. ‘One Couple, One Child,’ the most striking poster had said. ‘Eugenical and Well-Bred.’

‘Hard to miss?’ said Dr Yu.

‘That’s an idiom,’ I said, already tiring of this conversation. I looked over at Walter and saw him lean toward a group of Chinese students whose faces were upturned toward his like hatchlings waiting for their pellets. Loving every minute, as he used to love it when I’d listened to him, when he couldn’t teach me fast enough and couldn’t believe how fast I learned. If I’d wanted to catch him I couldn’t have planned a better way. As I watched he raised his right hand and, with a gesture that still wrenched my heart, smoothed and smoothed again the thinning hair at the back of his head. His fingers were as gentle as if a child lay under them; as if, by his own touch, he could bring himself to life again. I could still hear his voice, teaching me in the old days: There are two laws of ecology, he’d said. The first is that everything is related to everything else. The second is that these relationships are complicated as hell.

Dr Yu cleared her throat and I finished what I’d been saying. ‘Short for “hard to miss seeing,” I think – you use the phrase for something very obvious, right there in front of your eyes.’

Dr Yu nodded sharply. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. Her large earlobes were threaded with small pearls. ‘That’s a good phrase. I will use in a sentence: “Hard to miss that you are younger than your husband.” Is that right?’

‘It is,’ I agreed; this woman didn’t seem to miss much. Walter, lean and balding and lined, looked ten years older than his forty-two.

Someone gave a signal for the toasts to end and the eating to begin. ‘Come,’ Dr Yu said, plucking the sleeve of my dress. And although it had been wildly expensive, and was one of the few things I looked even passable in, for an instant I hoped she’d rip it. It was a wife-dress, a suburban dress. Something I never would have worn in the days before Walter, when my taste had run to black jeans and my brother’s torn shirts.

‘We should get some food,’ Dr Yu said. She’d apparently decided to adopt me for the evening. ‘Maybe you would introduce me to your husband?’

I nodded and followed her, steering my way around the Chinese string quartet who were clustered at the microphone and mangling some Mozart. Walter nodded coolly to me and then turned away. Dr Yu said, ‘Here, try some of this. And this, this is good, and this, and oh, you must have some of this, and this is delicacy, sea-cucumber, you have had?’

My stomach rumbled and Dr Yu smiled. What she heaped on my plate could have fed six people if those people hadn’t been me. Pork skin roasted in sugar and soy, chicken in white pepper and ginger, puffballs with bok choy, shrimp dumplings, deep-fried grass carp boned and cut to resemble chrysanthemums, marinated gizzards sliced fine, sea-cucumber with vegetables, roast duck. ‘This is good,’ Dr Yu said of each dish. Although she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, half of me, she heaped her own plate too and then turned to look wistfully at Walter as we left the table.

With a full mouth and waving chopsticks, Walter was holding court.

‘Maybe I could introduce you later,’ I said, following her eyes. ‘When he’s not so busy?’

‘Later,’ Dr Yu agreed. ‘You wish to sit with him?’

‘Are you kidding?’ I said, and then we had to pick that phrase apart. She made me feel useful, in an odd way – every bit of idiomatic speech I offered delighted her. She asked more questions and I explained what I could, until the music silenced us both. The string quartet played more Mozart, a girl sang some Mendelssohn, a man in a tuxedo sang arias from a revolutionary opera.

While the musicians performed, I watched Walter and considered how I’d ended up with him. I could hardly remember – something was thumping at me just then, something that made me want to plant a bomb in the midst of that civilized scene. I wanted to tip the tables over, light a bonfire in the corner, burst out of the room and into the life that was streaming through the streets outside. I wanted to dance on the tables, screaming my lungs out all the while. Instead, I applauded loudly whenever Dr Yu did. Her plate was already empty, I noticed. I hadn’t seen her take a bite.

Smiling, she picked up a conversational thread I thought we’d snapped, and she said, ‘So, why have you no children? Who will carry on your name?’

I shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’ The burr-voiced woman appeared at the microphone again, laughing this time. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘now, we have sung and made music for our var-ry distinguished for-eign friends. Now, we ask they sing for us! Everyone, sing your own country’s songs!’

The Chinese clapped; the rest of us laughed until we realized she was serious. Finally two good-natured Americans, surely small-town boys, made their way to the front of the room and sang a bawdy Irish tune off-key. Walter frowned, offended. Dr Yu said, ‘This is a typical American song?’

‘No,’ I told her, laughing. ‘It’s a very bad song.’

Dr Yu agreed. A troll-like man got up to sing a Hungarian song I almost recognized, and a Swede sang a song I was sure Mumu had once sung to me. Everyone danced and the tuxedoed man sang a Viennese waltz that sent people whirling around the room. A band – electric piano, two guitars, violin, drum – assembled near the microphone and tried with mixed success to accompany the singers. A Japanese limnologist sang a festival song that seemed to have something to do with a shovel. Three German algologists sang a lullaby; two Israeli invertebrate zoologists sang a folk song. More beer, more sweet pink wine. My dress was sticking to me and my armpits were damp. Dr Yu, who seemed to think we knew each other much better than we did, said, ‘You tell me if I am impolite to ask – how did you meet your husband?’

No point in going into that – I couldn’t explain it even to myself. I gave her the simple answer, meaning to be polite. ‘I was his student,’ I said, remembering how he used to read to me for hours, so caught up in his work that he’d hardly pause to catch his breath.

‘Ah,’ Dr Yu said with a smile. ‘Very good student?’

‘Very good,’ I agreed. ‘Too good. Brownnose.’

‘Brown-nose? What does that mean?’

‘Someone who is too nice to teacher, tries too hard, always sucking up …’

‘Suck-up?’

‘Never mind that one. Maybe you work with someone like this, someone who’s always trying to be the boss’s favorite – we call them “brownnose” from, you know – his face stuck to the boss’s … behind? Rear end?’

Dr Yu smiled, took a pen from her pocket, and quickly sketched two Chinese characters on her palm. She flashed them at me, rubbed them out quickly, and said, ‘We have a word, which translates in English as “ass-face” – is that close?’

‘Very.’

‘But you are not an ass-face.’

‘Sometimes I am,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I’ve been an enormous ass-face. You wouldn’t believe.’

Behind me, two Chinese scientists seemed to be discussing my new friend. I heard the word yu again and again, and I interrupted Dr Yu’s protestations to ask her what they were talking about.

‘Same old thing,’ she said wryly. ‘Work. All so very ambitious here. This is the new way, new reward-for-responsibility system made by Old Deng – you know?’

‘I thought I heard your name.’

Dr Yu laughed. ‘They are talking about what your husband does. They say yú with a rising tone – means fish, and yú with a falling-rising tone – means rain.’ She wrote the words on her palm in pinyin and added their tone marks. ‘Say after me,’ she commanded.

I did, amazed at her singing language. Until she coached me, all my tones had sounded exactly the same. Fish, rain, the effects of rain on fish, a rain of fish, a fishy rain – in my mouth there had been no difference. Dr Yu kept drilling me, passing the syllables back and forth, and I didn’t care that people stared at us. I was slowly beginning to get the idea and as I did I began to understand the men behind us, as if static had suddenly cleared from my ears.

There were four tones, said the books I had studied. Flat, rising, falling-rising, falling – four. The books had been clear. But without someone to talk with, the tones had never made it from the page to my ears. ‘Yú,’ said one of the men behind me, perfectly clearly. Rain. At the reservoir, Walter and I had worked even when it rained, even when the sky was so cold, so gray, so bleak, that there seemed to be no boundary between the lake and the air, between night and day, between work and the rest of life.

As if we had conjured it up, rain began to fall outside. Dr Yu fetched some more beer and then, while people around us danced and sang and told each other stories, we began trading words in earnest, correcting each other’s pronunciation, building sentences, muttering tones. I drew words on my palm, matching the characters she drew on hers and warming, finally, to her charm and persistence. She told me how she’d been sent off to raise pigs in Shanxi province during the Cultural Revolution – ‘the blood years,’ she said – and I told her how Mumu, my fat Swedish grandmother from whom I’d inherited my weight and my hair, had taught me to catch shad and bake them for hours until the bones dissolved. How I’d loved to fish but had never meant to study the creatures until Walter came along.

‘What is he like?’ Dr Yu said. ‘I mean, in his privacy?’

What was the harm in telling her? I thought about the way he wouldn’t eat unless the food sat correctly on his plate – peas here, potatoes there; no drips, no drops, no smears. How he couldn’t sleep without the top sheet tucked in all around him; how he liked his women as neat as his mother. Smooth, groomed, no visible pores or swellings, no fat – my God, my fat! How he dressed after the fashion of Einstein, in black socks, gray pants, shirts that varied slightly but were always subdued, jackets that were almost identical.

And how uncomfortable he was here in China, how much he disliked the steamy, crowded buses, the old clothes, the crowded sidewalks, the open-air markets with their unrefrigerated offerings, the smells, the dirt, the noise, and the absence of wildlife, which implied to him that everything had been eaten. I thought about that astigmatism of his, that twist which made him see the worst in anything, and about his ability to make others see the same way, as if he’d etched their corneas with acid rain.

But I didn’t say any of this. ‘He likes a clean house,’ I said instead. ‘He likes things neat.’

‘You live in a nice house?’ Dr Yu asked, and I said yes but then, pressed to describe it, found myself describing another house instead. Not our spacious, clean colonial so near the university, but the cramped bungalow where I’d grown up with my mother and father and brother and Mumu, who was stuck in a wheelchair and slept in the den. As I spoke I sketched the house’s outline in the air, and I could see that it seemed luxurious to Dr Yu.

‘Six rooms,’ she marveled. ‘We have three, very large apartment for just three people, now that our daughter and youngest son are away. Kitchen, sitting room, sleeping room separate. Plus a bath with running water. Plus central heat. You could come visit us, and see.’

I nodded. ‘Someday,’ I said. I thought this was only one of those conversations I’d had at a hundred cocktail parties. Vague promises, vague suggestions, all forgotten the next day and never followed up.

Dr Yu finished her beer and looked at me. ‘So, what do you do now?’ she asked. ‘For work, I mean.’

I was embarrassed to tell her about my recent idleness and so I stretched the truth instead, casting back to the houses I’d bought and redone with my great-uncle’s money. ‘I’m a renovator,’ I told her. ‘A rehabber.’

‘What is that?’

‘I buy old, ruined houses and fix them up again. I make them look nice, and then I sell them.’

Dr Yu stared at me, apparently fascinated. ‘This is a job?’ she said. ‘People pay you for your … your …’

‘Taste,’ I said firmly. ‘People pay me for my taste.’

‘Really?’ She seemed puzzled. ‘They can’t fix these old houses themselves?’

‘Well, they could,’ I said. ‘But they don’t have the time, or they don’t understand how to do it …’

‘I see,’ Dr Yu said. ‘That’s very interesting. Perhaps you could explain …’

But suddenly the burr-voiced woman stepped to the microphone again, waved the musicians silent, clapped twice, and said, ‘Thank you for attending this our reception-party. Good night.’

Instantly the room began to empty. I looked at Dr Yu; Dr Yu smiled and said, ‘The party is over. Time to go.’ She gathered her umbrella, her bag, and her books and moved into the stream of people headed for the door. Her bag had a damp stain on the bottom that was spreading up the side, and suddenly I knew where that plateful of food had ended up. ‘Our daughter and youngest son are away,’ she’d said, presumably meaning that her eldest son still lived at home. My father, heavier even than me, used to bring food home from the cafeteria where he worked, stuffed peppers and casseroles that he stowed in bags and then shared with me after my slim mother slept.

‘Wait,’ I said to her. I felt I owed her something, and Walter was headed our way. ‘Would you like to meet my husband?’ I had forgotten that Walter and I weren’t speaking.

Dr Yu nodded and blushed, and then Walter stood before us looking pained. ‘Walter,’ I said. ‘I’d like to introduce a colleague of yours. Dr Yu Xiaomin.’

Walter nodded, his dismissing, you-barely-exist-for-me nod, as easy to read in China as at home. He was tired, I knew, and depressed by the visit he’d made that afternoon to the university’s science facilities. I’d overheard him talking to Paul LeClerc on the way to the banquet, and there had been no mistaking his distress. He’d described the classrooms, bare and scarred, and the absence of equipment that would have been basic at home. ‘No autoclaves,’ he’d said. ‘No coldrooms. No electron microscope. The library doesn’t have any good journals. Thirty students share one dissection specimen. How are we supposed to help them?’ They hadn’t asked him for help, I knew; they had only asked to share their work with him and have him share his in return. But Walter had a missionary streak to him as wide as any river – he was apt to see lives different from his as something broken he was meant to fix. ‘We have to triage this,’ he’d said to Paul, quite seriously. ‘Separate the ones we can’t help from the ones we can.’ I knew he saw Dr Yu as someone past helping.

Dr Yu’s blush deepened as Walter tugged me aside and said, ‘Let’s go, I need to get out of here. The others are all on the hotel bus already. And I promised I’d talk to Fred Dobzhinski, and I’ve got things to do …’

I could have wrapped my hand around his heathery tie and pulled until his head parted from his neck. I turned and saw Dr Yu, already separated from me by a stream of people, fussing with the buttons of her blouse. She looked at me for a second and then looked away, and I looked at Walter again and saw a six-foot-tall carp standing on his tail. I pulled away from him, made my way to Dr Yu, and said, ‘I’m sorry, he’s such a prick sometimes …’

‘Prick?’ asked Dr Yu.

‘Schmuck,’ I said helplessly, knowing my meaning was still lost. ‘Asshole!’ I said much too loudly, sure Dr Yu would get this phrase despite my confusion of body parts and metaphors. ‘Not ass-face, asshole.’

Dr Yu smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ She scribbled another character on her palm and flashed it at me. ‘Hard to miss,’ she said.

‘Hard to miss,’ I agreed.

‘You will come to have dinner at my home tomorrow night?’ she asked. ‘We would be most happy – you can meet my husband and my son. My husband is a doctor and maybe he can fix your cough.’

I hesitated; the idea was impossible. We had some presentation scheduled for the next night, some show or dinner or entertainment, as we did every night. All we were ever going to see of China was the thin, thin skin, creamed and powdered and rouged and depilated.

‘Please,’ she said, watching me think. ‘It would be a great honor for us.’

I looked back for Walter but he was gone, vanished the way all of this, the singing and dancing and drinking and talking, the eating and proud hospitality, would vanish if he had his way. Already a dark yellow, sulfurous cloud hung over the city and made my lungs sting, as if I were manufacturing acid rain inside my chest. I coughed, then coughed again. I looked out the window and saw Walter near the bus, clicking his index finger against his teeth and sheltering his head with a newspaper. He stood all alone.

‘I’d be delighted to come,’ I told Dr Yu, making my mind up that instant. I liked her face, and her curiosity. And even if she’d approached me only because of my connection to Walter, it was me she’d asked to visit. ‘Can I come alone?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s what I meant.’ Quickly, while the waiters turned the lights off and the other guests left, she gave me directions. ‘Come to the Temple of Heaven,’ she said. ‘At five. Take a cab. I will meet you there at the Triple Sounds Stone and take you home – otherwise you will never find it. Is that all right?’