Lost in Translation

10

The second-to-last night in Yinchuan they ate dinner at the Number One. Alice noticed that when the plate was turned in Lin’s direction he selected a charred, wrinkled chili pepper with his chopsticks and bit into it, eyes closed. With his other hand he dragged his teacup to his mouth, forehead squeezed in pain and gratitude.

"I don’t think you’re supposed to eat it," she ventured.

He swallowed. "I like it." He gasped. "I want it. It’s just that I can’t bear it." He turned his gaze to her, letting all the weight of it fall on her. Eh, he thought, seeing her strain toward him and aware of the same stirring within himself, something’s between us. Shi bu shi? But they were in public. He dared do no more than look at her a certain way.

Of course, he could touch her now. He only had to move his leg a few inches under the table. Then he would know, and she would know, and it would be done. But what if he was wrong? Such a misstep would be disastrous. She was an outsider.

He picked up another hot pepper with his chopsticks, and placed it on her plate. "You know," he said to her softly, "it’s like life." Then he paused, and turned away to his left, where Dr. Kong was speaking to him.

Lin stepped out into the street, Meiyan’s photo in his pocket. He had left the hotel quietly when the group broke up after dinner. He was sure none of the others noticed. He paused for a moment, feeling the vast reassurance of a city around him, the swell of people, the tide of ongoing life. Pedestrians passed him, unconcerned. Animals, carts, children.

He opened his city map and thought through the places he’d covered. The new town-the industrial section on the other side of the train station. The old Chinese quarter. The old downtown. Tonight he would walk the Muslim quarter. He wondered what it would be like. The Muslims, the huimin, they were not like other Chinese. This was what he had always heard. An idea that had hardened in his mind. What was the word Interpreter Mo had used? Prejudice.

As he walked he thought about Mo Ai-li. The PLA had picked her up, then released her. That meant certainly they were watching him too. Should he change his plan? Stop looking for his wife?

No. All of the last twenty-two years had led him to this point. He had to find Meiyan. Besides, what could they do to him? He’d already lost everything.

Everything of then. This is now. Again he thought of Mo Ai-li. No. To Meiyan he’d made vows, he’d made promises. This was the least he could do for her now. He’d follow it to the end.

He touched his long fingers lightly to the photograph in his pocket and kept walking.

Master Tang arrived at Alice’s room at the appointed hour. The seven-day interval was finished and she had completed the rituals as he’d instructed her. Now from a small velvet cloth he unwrapped the wooden ling-pai, the spirit tablet.

She read the characters carved into it:

Meng Shaowen

Passed over July 14

Beloved by her descendant, the host of this house.

"It’s completed?" Alice asked.

"Eh," Master Tang reproved her, "obviously you are not highly literate! I suspected you might not be. Did you not notice that the dot is missing on the character zhu, host?"

"Oh, yes, of course." She felt herself flush. "I cannot face you. "

"It doesn’t matter," he grumped. "Anyway, this is what the cheng-zhu ritual is all about, do you understand me or not? The tablet does not come to life until we paint the eye on the dragon. The dot on the character zhu must be completed. Now. Usually to do this we choose the most literary member of the family. This person is the dian-zhu, the Inscriber of the tablet. But in this case-"

"You do it, Master Tang," she said swiftly.

"It will not do." He sighed. "The yin-yang master as the dian-zhu-oh no, it is unlucky. You must be the one to do it, Interpreter Mo."

"I’m not worthy."

He did not disagree. "Anyway, you must. In ink or in blood. You choose."

"In blood."

He bowed his head, removed a ceremonial pin from a silk box in his inner sleeve, and handed it to her.

He intoned a prayer while she stabbed her index finger. "Oh, shit," she breathed, as too much blood bubbled out.

"Just complete the character," he said softly.

Thank God I know where the dot goes, she thought, bending over the tablet, it would be so humiliating to have to ask him. The blood was dripping now. Quick. Right above the top horizontal stroke-there-she stood up. It was messy, but in the right place.

"Thus we send the spirit on its journey," Tang said softly. "The ling-pai is its earthly home. Now: the ritual of an-zhu, in which we place the ling-pai on the altar and reincorporate it into the family. Now you will become part of Madam Meng’s line. See that you serve her ghost well. In return she will always guide you."

Alice waited.

"Koutou, " he said, Kowtow.

"What?"

"Koutou!" More sharply.

Alice fell to her knees in front of the altar and knocked her forehead against the grimy carpet. Each time, she felt jolted a little farther off the track she’d been trapped on for so long. Could she really change ancestors so easily? Could she drop the scaffolding of Horace-or at least relax it?

When he was gone it would all change. She shivered with fear: this thought again, this possibility, Horace dying. Yet it might happen soon. She pictured herself in a world without him, a world where she had only her own heart and mind to follow. A world open and blank with possibility; terrifying, almost. She thumped her forehead on the carpet. All of you in the land of the dead, she prayed, help me. Let me become myself. And, Horace. When you go I want your love, I want to keep it to remember. But please go on and leave me in peace.

She paused in midreverence, half shocked at herself. She could feel Master Tang watching her. She looked up at him.

"You may rise now," he said. "You are the daughter of Meng Shaowen."

And Lucile, she added in her mind. And Horace. Then she thought: This is crazy. Even Chinese don’t do this anymore. Not educated Chinese. To them this was like the earth being flat. Like curing illness with leeches.

The discomfort billowed up inside her and she wanted to get the whole thing over with. Quickly she counted out the sum to which they had agreed.

He pocketed the money. "Good health. Long life."

"Bici, " she whispered, The same to you.

Guo Wenxiang slipped into an unmarked doorway in a back alley of the Chinese quarter, and knocked softly. He’d walked here casually, making many unnecessary turns, twisting and changing his route, entering buildings where he knew no one and standing in dark hallways, then leaving again quietly by other doors.

He was sure there was no one behind him. But in China there almost always was. He knew this well.

So as Guo knocked now, he glanced nervously around. The man who lived in this apartment had been a guard years ago at Camp Fourteen, the women’s camp on the other side of the mountains. Camp Fourteen had been a cluster of ocher huts on the flat, silty plain that spread out below the purple wall of the Helan Shan. By all accounts evil attended it. There were women who died of illness and malnourishment. Other women lost their health, and whatever remained of their humanity. It was said of this man, this former guard, that he had seen everything, and knew everything, but that it angered him when people asked him about it. Hua you shuo huilai, it was also said that after a few cups of wine his mouth loosened and his memories flowed. Guo held a bottle of Red Crane sorghum spirits tightly against his chest, waiting.

When the door was opened four men stood there, none of them the man he was looking for. Something was not right. He took a step back. "I’m sorry," he said. "I’m seeking the Honorable Chen. Perhaps he is not at home."

"Eh, but he is. He awaits you."

Guo pivoted to dart away, but a powerful hand clamped his wrist, and then another. "Don’t go," one of the men said cruelly, pulling him in and latching the door behind him.

A cold fatalism settled over Guo. He knew better than to show fear. And meanwhile he had his wits, and should he not deploy every power he had? Sometimes, the legends told, a man could prevail at times like this through words alone. Guo marshaled himself, sharpening his intelligence. He was prepared to speak-

But they were already advancing toward him.

Spencer and Kong were bent over a table in the back room of the Bureau of Cultural Relics, examining the mountain of microliths Kong had collected near the Shuidonggou site. Sorting them, grading them, packing them. Cobbles, flakes, hammerstones, points, and scrapers. From the Neolithic, pottery shards and beads.

"You see this?" Spencer examined a powerfully shaped stone scraper. "Beautiful. Late Paleolithic. Twenty-five, thirty thousand years." He placed it in one of the piles.

A secretary burst in with a sheaf of fax papers. "Datongle."

"Haode. " Kong took the papers. He scanned them at once, then turned his smile on Spencer. "Qianzheng!" He indicated the pages. "Visa! Visa!" He managed to get the word in English.

"Oh! Oh, my God! The visas for Eren Obo?" Spencer took the pages and grinned at them.

"Tai hao-le!"

"And what’s this?" Spencer pointed to the rest of the pile of fax pages. "Is this the literature search from your graduate student?"

But Kong only went off in a stream of Mandarin. Nevertheless his hand holding the pages aloft told Spencer they were practically the first scholars out here, the first since Teilhard. There’d been no surveys on archaic hunter-gatherer sites out here, no organized attempts to locate and date and describe and excavate anything besides Shuidonggou. No coherent picture at all of the nomadic foragers, or their transition to the Neolithic with its advent of settled life and agriculture. Nothing published-just the stuff on Shuidonggou itself.

Because, Christ, Spencer thought, they haven’t even looked! They don’t even know where to look. But I know. I know from the years of surveying back home. I know exactly where ancient people lived in this kind of terrain. Winters they lived in the alluvial fans, the creek margins-then in the summer they might have gone up in the mountains. Just like in the American West. Only, in America you’re lucky if you find a handful of intact sites in your whole career…

"Yanjiu jihui bu shao, " Kong exclaimed happily, tossing down the fax. His cellular phone rang and he pulled it off his belt and clicked it on. "Wei! Wei!"

Spencer sat, listening to Kong’s rapid Chinese, allowing his mind to drift. The opportunities in archaic desert cultures here were unbelievable, Christ yes, but he had to keep his mind on the real prize. Peking Man! Peking Man was the find that would make his career, that would get him noticed all over the world. He’d be back in at the conferences. He’d do papers, be quoted. And even though the agonizing reality was that he was now going to miss most of his son’s Halloween costumes and campfires and summer fireflies in jars, at least-when the boy had grown into a thinking adult-he would know his father had done something. He would know his father had brought back the first forebear, the man from the dawn of time. That would count for Tyler, someday. It had to.

He glanced at Kong, working the phone now, drumming his long fingers on the fax paper. Kong caught his eyes and grinned. It was amazing how he and Kong communicated, considering they couldn’t speak.

"Hao! Hao!" Kong shouted, and hung up. He folded the phone and clicked it back on his belt.

Adam pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it. "Dr. Kong," he said, "last night I wrote this letter to my son. Do you think I could use their fax machine before we go? Fax?" He pointed to the fax pages on the table.

"Keyi, " Kong said kindly, and pointed to the fax machine in the outer room.

"Dr. Lin?" She knocked again, harder. Was he there? It was late afternoon, they were leaving for Eren Obo the next day, she hadn’t seen him in hours. "Dr. Lin?"

Stirring sounds, then the faint sibilance of feet, and the door clicked open. "Xiao Mo." His eyes went wider. He’d been sleeping.

"Oh, I’m sorry," she said.

"It’s nothing." He yawned, straightened his shirt.

"I wanted to talk with you." She held her breath. He could tell her to come back later if he wanted.

He looked down at her strange light eyes, her rumpled clothing, her dusty athletic shoes. His own clothes were haphazard. He’d got up and covered himself in a hurry. "Come in."

She pushed past him into the cluttered room, still warm with the smells of sleep, and he saw her gaze move about. "I suppose I shouldn’t come here like this, just knocking on your door…"

"No, you’re welcome," he said, meaning it. "You’re always welcome."

"But I wanted to say something to you." She turned back toward him. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Could she just say it?

"Please." He indicated the two armchairs, the low table in between. "You’ll have tea?"

"Yes." She let her breath go in relief. "Thanks."

He stepped behind her and closed the door. She felt a thrill. They were alone.

"Iron Goddess of Mercy okay?" he asked, taking a small packet from the tea caddy.

"Oh yes, please."

"It’s strong."

"I know."

So she liked it that way too. He smiled, uncorked the thermos, and poured steaming water over the leaves, then put the cups on the table and lowered himself into the chair opposite her. "What’s happened?"

"Nothing. It’s not that anything’s happened."

He waited.

"Dr. Lin. Frankly speaking. I don’t know how to ask you this. I think perhaps it’s impolite to ask you. But I find that I need to know."

He made his voice quiet. "Whatever it is, Xiao Mo, put your heart at rest. It’s okay." He picked up her cup from the table and handed it to her. "Gei. " Then he took up his own cup, welcoming as he always did the black, bracing taste of bitter metal.

She sighed. "Dr. Lin. Are you-all this time, all these little things you say-are you trying to tell me something?"

Aiya-was she going to say it, just like that?

"Are you interested in me?" she blurted.

"Of course," he evaded. "You are our interpreter-"

"Dr. Lin!" she pleaded. "You know what I mean."

"What do you mean?" he asked softly.

"Are you interested in me!" she hammered. "The way a man is in a woman!"

There, she had done it, remarkable, broken all the rules of discretion and subtlety with which a new relationship ought to be forged. It was rash, ill thought out, un-Chinese. Oh. But exciting.

Nevertheless he was still Chinese, and had to turn it around. "Are you?" he said. "In me?"

She stared at him, aroused, exasperated. The American in her wanted to scream, but the Chinese thing to do was deflect. She closed her eyes. "Dr. Lin. Didn’t you ever have a dream, and in this dream you saw someone, let’s say someone you didn’t know very well, but in the dream you cared powerfully for them, maybe you even felt love, and when you awakened you knew immediately that this acquaintance was far more important than you had realized? Well? Have you?"

She opened her eyes and saw him looking at her, that hard look again.

"Yes," he said finally.

"Do I need to explain more?" she asked softly.

He shook his head, and felt his heart burst into bloom. So she did want him! Couldn’t he be sure now? She did. Sometimes it had seemed so clear-the way she was looking at him, talking to him. Zai shuo, he’d told himself so many times, she was a foreign woman. An outside woman. What did he know about such creatures? And what if he moved to couple with her and he was wrong and he grievously offended her-what bitterness might rain down on him then?

"What about Dr. Spencer?" he asked with difficulty. "The way I’ve seen you touch him, I thought perhaps-"

"No!" she cried. "There is nothing between us. That’s just being American. We are more suibian in America. It’s a friendly thing. Please. Believe me."

He smiled in relief. "Then what do you say I shall do?"

She thought. "Go with me now? Let’s walk around the city."

He stood and held out his hand. They stepped over a warm, messy pile of undershirts, socks, and trousers on their way out.

They followed Sun Yat-sen to Shanxi Avenue, which cut across the center of the city. She watched him. Would he tell her about himself now? It was odd that she didn’t know. Most Chinese, once they got comfortable with her, immediately and at considerable length spun out their life stories. Especially they detailed all that they had suffered during the Chaos.

Not that it had always been that way. In the seventies, she’d heard, everyone was furtive and afraid. Eyes down. But by the time she first came to China in the early eighties Mao had died and it had all erupted, everyone talking at her, talking, telling her their terrible stories. At the time it had seemed to her like a strange, sudden, ad-hoc form of Chinese opera, this verborrhea, so extravagantly histrionic. So like the squealingly choreographed dramas, played to audiences who knew the story already, knew it intimately, could then appreciate it as they laughed, applauded, gossiped, ate, and spat. The Luanshi,the Chaos.

"Did you have a bad time in the Chaos?" she asked softly. They had come to a park, and walked now under the trees.

"You can’t imagine it," he said tightly.

"I believe you’re wrong about that," she answered, which made him look at her. Inside, she thought: You should tell me, because I know all about holding and hiding. I could help you.

"Eh, Xiao Mo, I’m sorry." He stared at their scuffling feet. "If it was I who suffered, I could talk about it. I know, most people have told it all, they told it years ago and now it’s a boiling river that has finally run out of them and left them in peace. But it was not I who was hurt. My wife would express only the truth-and she was the one who was taken. Not me. Do you understand me or not?"

"You mean you feel guilty. Because you survived. And it was Meiyan, and you don’t like to talk about Meiyan."

"Yes. Especially-" he stopped.

Especially to me, she thought willfully, because you have feelings for me. Say it.

"Especially to you," he said, looking at her.

A group of rough-cotton-clad men brushed by them, talking boisterously in Mongolian. After several solid blocks of cement low-rises they were passing a temple, with its ornate red pillars and curving golden roofs. Rustling acacias stretched out in front of them along the sidewalk.

"Will you talk about her now?" she whispered.

"If it is what you want."

Ask him. Just ask him.

"Do you still love her?"

He stopped and looked down at her. "Yes. I’ve never stopped."

She looked frozen back up into his face.

"Eh, Xiao Mo." He sighed. "It’s true that she has been gone for more than twenty years. But I never got any definite answer… so in my heart, and according to the law, I am still married. I was never willing to denounce her. Do you understand me or not?"

"Of course I do," she said. "But Dr. Lin, that was years ago. You have heard nothing for so long, isn’t it so? Don’t you think-"

"I think she is my airen," he said simply, stubbornly, with an edge in his voice.

She felt stung. Airen, Loved one, the word that meant a wife, or a husband-for life. Caution, she thought.

"And it’s a strange thing," he continued. "In some way my feeling for her is even greater now than when we were together in life."

Alice felt numb. Teilhard had written about that to Lucile: Sometimes I think that this very privation I must impose youmakes me ten times more devoted to you. "It’s a… level of commitment," Alice said, not sure how to respond.

"Yes," he said, looking at her strangely, "very Chinese- commitment."

"Not just Chinese," she corrected him. "All people feel this way." She knew he probably thought Western women were loose, casual, suibian. As she’d been up until recently-up until now, as a matter of fact. But she was through with that. She was going to start a new life.

"I don’t know if all people are the same," he said. "I am Chinese. I made the commitment to my wife and I have held to it. Though lately"-he looked at her-"I begin to wonder."

Oh, this man could change, Alice thought with a streak of hope. He could. She laid her hand briefly, sympathetically, on his arm. It was the same American gesture that had made him jump like a frightened animal in the middle of the night, in the garden at the Number One. This time-though they were in public, in daylight, in a crowd-he responded by touching her hand lightly with one finger.

"My life has also been hard," Alice ventured.

He looked down, his face open.

"I mean my father. He’s an elected official, very famous, I think I told you, but I am so ashamed of his beliefs. He is a racist. He thinks whites are superior to all the other races in the world."

"You mean blacks."

"I mean everyone."

"Including Chinese?"

"Yes."

Lin snorted in disbelief.

"Of course I don’t agree with such things."

"No."

"But I am his daughter. It follows me everywhere."

"Terrible."

She saw the sympathy in his face and felt that she did not have to explain the Alice Speech, the thirty-year march of civil rights, the terrible immorality of racism in America. Because the immoralities in China had been equal-maybe greater- though different. And there were certainly leaders in China whose children struggled under shame the same way she did.

"So that is the thing in you I can feel," Lin said softly. "Some bitterness. Is it your father?"

"Horace," she corrected him. "Yes. And perhaps my mother too-I never had one. She died when I was a baby."

"Zhen bu rongyi, "he said, with genuine sympathy. She felt him wanting to touch her.

"Let’s sit a moment," he said. They had come to a grassy area of stone benches flanked by beds of hollyhocks. In front of them rose the ancient, pagoda-style drum tower.

A northern-type opera was being performed at the foot of the tower on a makeshift wooden stage. A few old men carrying wooden birdcages had gathered to watch the actors shriek and strike their poses through the story. She rather liked the sound of opera. She liked it the way she liked the sound of a baseball game on the radio-which in fact, she hated, just as much as she actually hated Chinese opera if she had to sit down and watch it. But both Chinese opera and baseball, as background noise, gave her a secure and filled-up feeling. She had a childhood memory of Horace listening to baseball on the radio.

Now she and Lin sat on the stone bench while the female impersonators in their brilliant face paint flourished their fake gilt-crusted fingernails, and the old men swung their birdcages and cracked sunflower-seed shells between their teeth and laughed their bubbly phlegm laughs, and a boy in mended clothes beside the stage beat on the big brass gong.

Suddenly Lin reached over, took her hand in his, and squeezed it. Then he let go of her hand, and returned his hand to his lap. She looked. He was immobile, but his whole frame blazed with alertness. She loved this quality in Chinese men, this physical hyperawareness, this restraint. It was like a guide wire, anchored in her softest heart.

"Truly surprising to find the two of you here," said a voice, and they looked up. Guo Wenxiang.

"What happened?" Alice gasped. There were ugly bruises on the side of Guo’s face, blurring out all around his sunglasses.

"I asked too many questions about history," he said, eyes traveling briefly to Lin.

For a moment she thought he was going to say something about her asking him to look for Meiyan, but he did not.

"Can we do anything for you?" Lin asked, voice low.

"No. Part of my job. Isn’t it so?"

"Do you want to say who they were?" Lin asked.

Guo laughed, long and thin. "I’m not even sure." Then he turned, and wove away from them into the crowd.

Alice and Lin exchanged brief glances. "My God, Lin," she breathed. "Is that going to happen to us next?"

"Oh, no." He touched her knee. "They wouldn’t dare! You are not one of us. You’re an outsider. This is international cooperation. Really, Mo Ai-li, you are safe."

How I wish it, she thought, looking up at him.