The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

15

Chengdu is the New Orleans of China.

In the States, you go to New York if you want to work. But if you want to play, you go to New Orleans. In China, you go to Beijing if you want to get something done. But if you want to do nothing, you go to Chengdu.

The people of Chengdu have the easy bonhomie common to southerners worldwide, and, like the denizens of New Orleans, they consider their city not so much a municipality within a country as a land of its own. There is considerable justification for this sentiment in Chengdu, which was the capital of the ancient land of Shu some four hundred years before the unification of China. The state of Shu rose again after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, leaving Chengdu and the whole province of Sichuan with an attitude of autonomy considerably frustrating to its would-be rulers in Beijing.

Chengdu has always attracted poets, painters, and artisans. Maybe it’s the warm weather or the sunshine. Maybe it’s the lush bamboo, or the hibiscus, or the surrounding countryside of fertile rice paddies and wheatfields. Maybe it’s the broad boulevards or the black-tiled houses with the carved wood balconies, or the wide sidewalks or the promenades that flank the river called the Silk Brocade. Maybe it’s all those things combined with a spirit of independence, but Chengdu loves its artists with a ferocious pride.

And its food. Like New Orleans, people go there to eat, and the natives are always eager to take you places that serve the “real thing.” In Chengdu that means outdoor stands that dish up hot noodles, a crowded restaurant that serves bean curd in forty-two different sauces, or a place on the outskirts that makes a hot chicken with peanuts that has inspired poets.

And tea. Before the Cultural Revolution pronounced them decadent, tea pavilions dotted the city. Often in the open air, or under bamboo leave roofs, the teahouses were neighborhood places where the locals gathered to consume vast quantities of green tea, play some mah-jongg, and carry on the exuberant conversations for which Chengdu was famous. They were places where poets sat in corners to write, and where artists sketched and painted. Here in the tea pavilions the natives escaped the summer’s afternoon rains and listened to the great storytellers hold forth for hours with much-loved tales from the golden past, stories about flying dragons, or runaway princesses, or the flight of the emperor Tang Hsuan Tsung into the vast wilderness of the western Sichuan mountains.

Of course, Chengdu changed with the revolution, and many of the city’s older neighborhoods were sacrificed to the new god of industrialization. A new generation of artists arrived, but their sketches became not paintings but blueprints, and their poetry could only be found in the dull symmetry of utilitarian factories and exhibition halls. The population swelled to a million workers, with three million more laboring in the surrounding industrial suburbs. The city that had once been famous for its silk became renowned for its metals, and the silky softness of the Chengdu spirit was muted with factory soot.

The new regime collectivized the surrounding countryside, replacing the efficient, highly productive estates and small family farms with huge, unwieldy communes. For the first time within memory or legend, the province knew hunger. During the Great Leap Forward the city itself avoided mass famine, but, ironically, the roads to the countryside were clogged with starving refugees from the Rice Bowl districts outside the city. Mao himself visited in 1957 to discuss his economic strategy with local agricultural experts. He told them to meet their quotas.

After a brief respite of normality, the Cultural Revolution erupted, first in Beijing, then in Shanghai, and then in Guangzhou, as Mao sought to destroy his government and replace it with the “permanent revolution.” It seemed to happen overnight in Chengdu; its urbane, insouciant people awoke one morning to find the “big character posters” in the schools, then in the streets, and then in government hallways. A Chengdu unit of the Red Guard formed, tore down the ancient city walls as atavistic reminders of feudalism, destroyed the decadent exhibitions of paintings, vandalized the park dedicated to the great poet Du Fu, and then closed the teahouses. The city’s trademark smile became a rictus of paranoia as friend betrayed friend, son betrayed father, daughter betrayed mother, and the community betrayed itself. In the darker corners of the narrower streets the mutterings of secession started as the Red Guard splintered into competing factions. The city smoldered.

The fire exploded in 1967, when the rival groups of Red Guards waged pitched battles for possession of factories, post offices, and train stations. Machine-gun fire flashed across the Silk Brocade River, tanks rumbled down the boulevards, gasoline bombs tumbled from the carved balconies. The older people stayed inside and left the city to its youth, who fought each other in a frenzy of violence to determine who loved Chairman Mao the most. The city burned.

Even Mao had seen enough, and he ordered his young worshipers to cease fighting and respect authority. They had a hard time squaring this request with “permanent revolution” and decided that Mao was being coerced by treasonous bureaucrats, so they took the revolution up a couple of notches and attacked police stations and government buildings. Mao sent the army, and the People’s Liberation Army rolled into Chengdu to put down the insurgency. The Red Guard resisted. Thousands were killed. Many of the survivors were sent to prison, or sentenced to labor camps, or packed off into the countryside to learn firsthand about the life of the masses. The city put on the ashes of mourning.

Years of sullen silence followed. Artists stopped painting, poets produced no verse, the great storytellers were either wise enough to tell no stories or told them to themselves inside their cells. The once-unbuttoned city buttoned itself up tightly and waited for this long afternoon rain to end.

Neal Carey heard a lot about Chengdu’s history from Xiao Wu. Xiao Wu talked nonstop for three straight days as he took Neal around to every sight of any possible significance in the greater Chengdu area. It was marathon tourism, an endurance event. Neal wondered if Wu was just that proud of his hometown, or whether it was William Frazier that was on display and not the city. Maybe Wu was just drunk with the power of having a car, a driver, and the chance to practice his English.

Not that Neal minded all that much. Cooped up as he had been for three months, it felt great to be out in the warm sun, and if the sultry summer air wasn’t exactly invigorating, it wasn’t exactly painful either. And it felt wonderful to walk. At first his leg muscles sent him messages in the form of pins and needles, and he needed to rest a lot. But after the first morning he found that he and Xiao Wu were taking longer jaunts away from the government car, and that his legs seemed to be waking up from their long sleep.

And they did cover some ground, because Wu seemed unwilling for his guest to miss a single temple, shrine, park, panda, or rare bamboo plant in the city.

Some of it was great, like on that first wonderful morning. He had sprung out of bed like a kid at Christmas, bolted breakfast down, and was dressed and ready half an hour before Wu knocked on the door. Wu was excited also. This was his first important assignment, he explained, and he also confessed that it would be only the second time he had ever ridden in a private automobile. He hurried Neal through the hotel lobby and into the waiting car. The driver was a middle-aged man in a green Mao jacket, and he went to such great lengths not to appear to be listening that Neal made him for a fink right off the bat.

Wu launched into his soliloquy right away.

“You can now see the outside of the Jinjiang Guest House,” he said before the driver started the engine.

“It’s nice to see the outside of something,” Neal said. Even the Jinjiang Guest House, which was a boring rectangular concrete box.

“The Russians designed it,” Wu said, as if reading Neal’s mind. He leaned over the seat and gave some directions to the driver, then looked at Neal with an expression that could only be described as “thrilled.” It occurred to Neal that he thought of Xiao Wu as a kid, even though they were roughly the same age.

That first morning they drove west along the north bank of the Nan River to Caotang Park, “home of the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu,” Wu explained as they got out of the car in a small parking lot surrounded by tall bamboo trees. They walked for few minutes and came to a small shrine beside a narrow creek. Wu explained that the shrine had been built to honor Du Fu, and that the only reason it wasn’t torn down by the Red Guard was that Mao had once written two lines of verse honoring the ancient poet.

“He was born in 712 and died in 770, but the shrine was not built until sometime around the year 1100.”

Neal flipped through his mental reference cards. Du Fu was writing poetry around the time of Charlemagne, and this shrine had been built to honor him around the time William the Conqueror had fought the battle of Hastings. When my Irish ancestors were running around in skins, Wu’s people were building a shrine to a poet because they had been reciting his work for four hundred years.

They lingered in the shrine for an hour, looking at a collection of landscape paintings that had been “lost” during the Cultural Revolution and had just recently been “found” and put on display. Neal thought briefly about Li Lan and wondered if she had ever stood here looking at these paintings. He shoved the thought out of his head and asked Wu to translate some of the other poems that were inscribed on wooden plaques. Wu did, and it turned out that old Du Fu was a dour fellow who wrote mostly about war, loss, and dislocation.

“He lived in a time of great chaos,” Wu said.

They wandered around the park for the rest of the morning. Wu dutifully recited the name of every plant and bird, although Neal could tell it didn’t interest him much. After a quick alfresco lunch of noodles, they got back into the car and drove to another park.

“Nanjiao Park,” Wu said. “Site of the shrine to Zhu Geliang.”

Neal knew his cue.

“Who was Zhu Geliang?”

“Come see.”

They walked a path through a lush garden to a large, imperial red shrine where a large painted statue of a soldier sat complacently.

“Zhu Zeliang was a great military strategist during the Three Kingdoms era that followed the demise of the Han Dynasty. Chengdu was the capital city of one of the Three Kingdoms, the state of Shu Han.”

“When was this?”

“Zhu lived from 181 to 234, but the shrine was not built until the Tang Dynasty.”

“About the time Du Fu was writing.”

“You have a good memory. Yes, that is correct. Chairman Mao had the shrine completely repaired in 1952. He was a great admirer of Zhu Geliang’s military thought, and he would send young officers here to learn from Zhu’s writings.”

Sure enough, Neal thought as he looked around, there were a number of PLA officers scribbling earnestly in their notebooks from plaques on the wall. Neal found himself staring at them and getting sidelong glances in return. But there they were, he marveled, taking notes directly from writings that were almost two thousand years old.

Wu walked him around the park, again pointing out the various flora and fauna. They strolled the edges of ponds that had fallen into disrepair and were just now being revived. Then they stopped for tea at a newly reopened pavilion that needed some roof patching and a good cleaning. But the few customers who were there on this working day didn’t seem to care. It was enough to get a cup of green tea and sit at the bamboo tables as a waitress came along with a kettle of hot water for refills.

Wu let the water steep in his lidded cup for a minute or so, and then poured the contents on the ground. The dark green tea leaves stuck to the bottom of the cup. The waitress refilled it, and Wu waited another minute before repeating the process. After the next refill, he let the cup sit for a few more minutes, removed the lid, and took a deep sip. Then he smiled with satisfaction.

“The first time, it’s water,” he said. “The second time, it’s garbage. The third time, it’s tea.”

They drank a few cups, talked about Huckleberry Finn and Innocents Abroad, complained about the vicissitudes of college life. Turned out that Wu was a recent graduate of Sichuan University, where he had studied tourism. His father had been a professor of English, had been in jail for it, and was now a room service waiter in a Chengdu hotel. But the authorities, realizing that they would need English-speakers to service the tourist trade they now coveted, pulled Wu’s file from a thousand others and admitted him to university. A job with CITS, the China International Travel Service, followed straight away. Wu’s great ambition was to become a “National Guide,” one of the elite cadre who escorted tourist groups for their entire stay in the country.

“Right now,” he explained, “I am just a local guide, authorized for Sichuan only. But I would very much like to see the rest of China, especially Beijing and Xian.”

“They put your father in jail for teaching English?” asked Neal, who knew a few English teachers who could profit from the experience.

“For speaking English.”

“Why?”

Wu shrugged.

“Cultural Revolution,” he said, as if the phrase explained everything.

“Do you think he’ll ever get his teaching job back?”

“Perhaps.”

I guess they don’t have tenure in China, Neal thought. In the States, once a professor got tenure, you couldn’t fire him if he buggered a goat on his desk during a lecture. You couldn’t get him out of that professional chair with a tow chain and an ox. But here you had English professors getting the sack for… speaking English.

“So what do you think about Mao now?” Neal asked.

Mao now? How now, Mao?

Wu stared at the table. “He liberated the nation, but he made some mistakes, I think.”

Wu was so clearly uncomfortable talking about it that Neal let it drop. It wasn’t the time to push. At this pace, there’d be plenty of time for that later. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry, that was for sure. What were they waiting for, he wondered.

Wu must have figured the conversation had gone on long enough, because he brought them back to touring with a vengeance. They hit the Cultural Park and the tomb of Wang Jian, a Tang Dynasty mercenary and self-styled emperor. They dropped in on the Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which served to refresh Neal’s memory of his bout with acupuncture. They wrapped the afternoon up with a visit to the People’s Park, where seemingly thousands of would-be swimmers were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in three Olympic-size pools.

“You sure have a lot of parks in this town.”

“Chengdu people like to relax.”

They were driving back to the hotel when Wu casually pointed out the Xinhua Bookstore.

“The what?” Neal asked. “Did you say ‘bookstore’?”

“Xinhua Bookstore, yes.”

“Stop the car.”

Neal noticed that the driver hit the brake just a half-second before Wu gave the instruction.

“Let’s walk,” Neal said.

“You are not tired?”

“Suddenly I have all sorts of energy.”

Wu told the driver to meet him in the hotel lot.

“Xiao Wu,” Neal said as the driver pulled away, “do they sell English books here?”

Wu said, “They only sell textbooks at the university.”

“No, I mean books in English. Novels, short stories, the dreaded nonfiction.”

Wu shuffled his foot on the sidewalk. “Perhaps.”

“Come on, Wu.”

“I am not authorized to take you there.”

“Were you ordered not to take me there?”

Wu brightened. “Noooo…”

“Wu… Wu, I haven’t had anything to read in three months. Do you know what that’s like?”

“Are you joking? Cultural Revolution?”

“So help me, Wu.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you my best abusive words.”

“Like what?”

“Cocksucker.”

Neal watched anxiously as Wu put the compound together and a glimmer of understanding came to his eyes.

“Cocksucker,” Wu intoned, his eyes widening. “Does that mean-”

“Yup.”

Wu burst into a hysterical giggle. He repeated the word several times, each repetition sending him into a fresh paroxysm of laughter. He was bent over double on the sidewalk, oblivious to the stares of passersby, muttering “cocksucker” until he cried.

“And that is an abusive term?” he asked when he had caught his breath.

“Oh, you bet.”

“In Chinese… tsweh-tsuh.”

“Tsweh-tsuh.”

That set him off again, and his fresh hysteria set Neal off, and they both stood on the sidewalk laughing until their stomachs hurt and they couldn’t laugh anymore.

“Okay, cocksucker,” Wu said. “Let’s go to the bookstore.”

Bookstore. Bookstore. Wu might as easily have said “Paradise” or “Heaven.” Neal breathed it in as he went through the door. The smell of books, that clean paper smell, filled his nostrils and went straight to his brain. He looked around at the shelves filled with books-all in Chinese, all absolutely incomprehensible to him-and then went around touching them. He stroked their spines, and felt their covers, and examined them as if he understood their titles and could read their pages.

Wu went over to the checkout counter and had a quiet conversation with the clerk. Neal felt his heart sink when the clerk shook his head vigorously, but Wu kept talking patiently and quietly, and a few minutes later he had procured a key.

“Come on,” he said. “There are some English books in the storeroom. Try not to look so… obvious.”

Wu opened the door and Neal stepped into heaven. Hundreds of paperbacks filled some cheap metal shelves and were piled up on the floor.

“I love you, Wu.”

“Cocksucker.”

“I’ll take them all.”

“Just one. And hurry, please.”

“Cocksucker.”

They were mostly medical texts. Wu explained that there had been a medical college that had once been staffed by Americans and Canadians. But there were also some volumes of fiction. Melville’s Billy Budd, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn had found spots on the shelves amid the anatomy tests and emergency-aid manuals.

“Any Hemingway? Fitzgerald?”

“Decadent.”

Then Neal spotted a pile of books in the corner. All Penguin Classics. Goddamn, he thought, could it be? Could I get so lucky? He attacked the pile like a rat in a garbage can. Bleak House… Oliver Twist… Bleak House again. Jude the Obscure… fucking Beowulf…

Then there it was. Unbelievably, in the middle of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, southwestern China… Tobias Smollett… Roderick Random. There is a God and he loves me, Neal thought. He grabbed the book before it could disappear into an opium dream.

“This is it,” he said.

“I never heard of it.”

“You will.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

“I want two books.”

“Not safe. Too obvious.”

“Please.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Have I told you about ‘motherfucker’?”

“But two is all.”

Neal took the copy of Huckleberry Finn off the shelf.

“Do you own it?” he asked.

Wu flushed. “No.”

“Please. My gift.”

“I am honored.” Wu bowed deeply and quickly. “Now let’s go.”

Wu picked up two thin Chinese books in the main room and sandwiched the English volumes between them before he brought them to the counter. He took the appropriate amount of cash from Neal’s wallet, paid the bill, and walked quickly out into the sunshine.

“Thank you so very much for the book,” he said.

“Thank you so very much for bringing me here. Is it a problem? And is the book safe for you to have?”

“I think so, now.”

Wu escorted Neal back to his room and said he would pick him up again at nine the next morning. Lest Neal have any illusions about his role, he heard the lock click with the shutting door.

The human mind is a funny thing, Neal thought. When he was lying in shackles in the Walled City, all he wanted was to get out of there. He would have given anything he had-his heart, mind, and soul-for salvation from that hellhole. When Li Lan had come, he had wept with relief and gratitude. In the long, sleepy days of his confinement he had simply given in to the care and comfort until first his body and then his mind came back.

But now his mind was back, and the funny thing was that it wasn’t happy. He had all the necessities, all the creature comforts he had longed for in Hong Kong. He was well treated, out of danger-he even had books to read-but his mind started to think about other things.

First there was Joe Graham. When Neal had left him on the San Francisco street, he had thought it would be a matter of days or weeks, not months, before he would contact his mentor. Graham must be going crazy with worry, Neal thought. If he knew Graham-and he knew Graham-the leprechaun would have dogged him to Hong Kong, maybe even tracked him as far as the Walled City, maybe even now would be making deals to try to find him and get him out. But even Graham couldn’t make this jump, couldn’t have any way of finding out that he was sitting in Chengdu with a different identity, a prop in some sort of show-and-tell game run by his jailer-hosts.

Second, what was the game? He didn’t buy this identity-wash bit for a second. They had him here for a reason, and Neal was beginning to think they were stalling before deciding just what that reason was. Maybe they were waiting for further developments, waiting for another move in the game to see which way they’d move him.

Which was the third thing that was troubling him. He had become a game piece, a passive pawn that other people moved around at their whim or will. Shit, he hadn’t done anything active since his rooftop bomber routine on Waterloo Road. They had beat him, knocked the confidence out of him, and he was just starting to recover from it. It was time to get back in the game. Time to do something to get his own life back.

With his copy of Roderick Random and a pen, he got to work. He was still working when the waiter came with his dinner tray. Having devoured the meal, he took the book with him to read while he soaked in an almost scalding bath, and then went back to work at his table. He took the book with him to bed, and woke up with it on his chest when the waiter rattled the breakfast tray.

“Are you taking him out again today?” Xao asked. He lit his second cigarette of the early morning.

“Yes, Comrade Secretary,” Peng answered. “And no surveillance appeared yesterday?” “Only our own.” “You are quite sure?”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”

Oh, yes, Comrade Secretary, I am quite sure. None appeared because I ordered none.

Xao inhaled the smoke and worried. On the face of it, it was good that no government surveillance had picked up their “Mr. Frazier,” but faces often lied. And young Frazier’s American friends were raising quite a fuss in Hong Kong. Why had it not reached Beijing? If it had, they would arrest Frazier as soon as he appeared above ground. We certainly trotted him around enough yesterday. Better to be safe and put Mr. Frazier on display a bit more. If the security police picked him up, there would still be time to dig Li Lan and Pendleton in deeper. If the police were truly unaware of Frazier’s true identity, then the rest of the operation could be activated.

“Show him around the city again today,” Xao ordered. “If all stays quiet, take him to the countryside tomorrow.”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”

“Good morning.”

Peng turned on his heel with the curt dismissal. Perhaps Comrade Secretary Xao will learn more courtesy when I have the opportunity to interrogate him. Perhaps I shall ask him to light my cigarettes and watch me smoke them.

But first to put them all together-the woman, the scientist, and the persistent young American. Yes, gather them at the scene of Xao’s intended treason, these three strands of the rope with which Xao will hang himself.

Patience, he cautioned himself. Move slowly. Let Xao think it is safe.

Xao waited until Peng had left and then called in his driver.

“How is it?” Xao asked.

“Wu and the American get on well. They are becoming friends.”

“Good. Good. You will be their driver again today.”

The driver nodded deferentially. Xao handed him the pack of cigarettes and motioned him out the door.

I would have more men like him, Xao thought, instead of that snake Peng. He is not clever enough to win, just clever enough to cost me resources and trouble. But he has his uses.

“Good morning, cocksucker,” Wu said.

“Good morning, motherfucker.”

Wu giggled with delight and opened the car door for Neal.

“Today we see the east side of the city,” Wu announced.

They started with the zoo.

Neal Carey liked a zoo as much as the next guy, provided the next guy thought that they were among the most depressing places on earth. He understood that they were necessary, probably even beneficial, in that they were used to breed species that mankind had succeeded in almost wiping out. He also knew that the animals in zoos spent their days pretty much the way their cousins did in the wild, sleeping and eating. There was just something about looking into cages-or even over the hedges and moats that the enlightened Chengdu Zoo featured-at the individuals of another species, that downright demoralized him.

Nevertheless, he feigned polite interest at the golden monkeys, the speckled deer, and the gibbon apes that led up to the featured attraction, Sichuan’s own giant pandas. The two pandas had their own entire section, an “environment” of rocks and bamboo separated from the admiring public by a high railing and a moat. The pandas didn’t actually do much, just sat there eating bamboo and looking back at the gawkers.

Wu was quite enthusiastic and gave Neal a thorough rundown on the history, physiology, and behavior of the giant panda, as well as on the government’s efforts to save it from extinction. This was followed by a complete history of the Chengdu Zoological Association and its tribulations during the Cultural Revolution. Even the pandas had not been immune from political analysis, and might well have been liquidated as a symbol of bourgeois preoccupation with pets had not it shared a name with the Chairman-the Chinese name for panda being “bear cat,” Shr Mao-and hence been immune from criticism. It was true that certain radical Red Guards had seen the zookeepers’ confinement of the panda as symbolic of the bureaucracy’s hemming in of Mao Tse-Tung, and demanded that the pandas be set free, but the zookeepers trumped them with an offer to release the pandas along with all the other mao, such as lions, leopards, and tigers, on the condition that the Red Guard open these cages themselves. The Guard declined.

“Too bad,” Wu muttered. “I would like to have seen those bastards try to put a dunce cap on a tiger.”

“Did they do that to your father?” Neal asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Neal didn’t answer, but from the hard, angry look on Wu’s face he knew that it mattered. Big time.

They strolled through the zoo for a while longer, eating peanuts in place of lunch as Wu described the natural history, habitat, and folklore of every animal in the zoo.

“I never knew my father,” Neal said as they neared the parking lot.

“You are a… bastard?” Wu asked. He was shocked, not only by the fact, but that Neal would choose to reveal it.

“Yeah.”

“I am sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Wu shook his head. “In China, family is everything. We are not so much individuals as we are family. A person will happily sacrifice his life to ensure that the family survives. Do you have no family?”

“No family,” answered Neal. Unless, he thought, you counted Joe Graham and Ed Levine, Ethan Kittredge, and Friends of the Family.

“No brothers or sisters?”

“Not that I know about.”

“That is very sad.”

“Not if you don’t know any different.”

I guess.

“Perhaps not.”

Wu was quiet as they drove away from the zoo, and he provided only cursory narration for the scenery of apartment blocks and factories that made up the northeastern part of the city. He brightened a little as they came to Sichuan University.

“What university did you attend?” he asked.

“Columbia, in New York City.”

“Ah,” said Wu politely, although he had clearly never heard of it. “What did you study?”

“Eighteenth-century English literature.”

“Qing Dynasty.”

“If you say so.” “I have read some Shakespeare.”

“Oh, yeah? Which?”

“Julius Caesar. It concerns the oppression of the masses by first a militarist dictator and then a capitalist oligarchy.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Do you believe all that?”

“Of course.”

“So what is Huckleberry Finn about?”

“Slavery and the rejection of bourgeois values. What do you think it is about?”

“A boy on a river.”

“Whose thinking is correct?”

“You have your interpretation and I have mine. One isn’t any better or worse than the other. We’re both right.”

Wu chuckled and shook his head. “What you say is impossible. Thought is either correct or incorrect. Two different interpretations cannot be right. One must be right and the other wrong.”

“They’d love you at Columbia.”

“Yes?”

“Fuck yes.”

Wu laughed but then looked serious and said, “You are joking with me, but I think this is the difference between our two cultures. I believe that wrong thought leads to wrong action. Therefore, it is very important that people be taught correct thought. Otherwise, how will they know how to act correctly? I think in your society, you believe that it is bad to insist on correct thought, but then, because your people do not have correct thoughts, they perform bad actions. This is why you have so much crime and we do not.”

Neal almost answered that it is also why China could have a Cultural Revolution and the States couldn’t, but he stopped. He didn’t want to hurt Wu’s feelings.

“We just don’t believe that there is only one way to think.”

“Exactly.”

“I have a correct thought,” Neal said.

“What is it?”

“Let’s go out for dinner tonight. Can you arrange it?”

“I do not have money,” Wu said unabashedly.

“I do,” Neal said. Mr. Frazier had come to China loaded.

“I think that your thought is a correct one, then,” Wu answered. “Would you like to eat at the Hibiscus?”

“Wherever you say.”

“It is the best.”

“The Hibiscus it is.”

But before the Hibiscus, there was more touring. They hit the Cultural Palace, the People’s Market, and the River View Pavilion, where an enormous terrace overlooked the Min River. It seemed to Neal that they were covering the entire city, putting shoe leather to every public place; the whole scene reminded him of a fisherman who casts his lure all over the pond, hoping for the big fish to strike.

But that’s okay, he thought, because I’m going to be the first bait in history that catches both the fish and the fisherman.

“Chengdu is the best place to eat in China,” Wu said. He had tossed back more than one maotai. “And the Hibiscus is the best place to eat in Chengdu.”

Neal wouldn’t argue with that. The decor wasn’t much; in fact, it looked like any Chinese restaurant you might wander into in Providence, Rhode Island, if you were more interested in getting laid than in getting moo goo gai pan. You walked in a narrow doorway off the street into a minuscule lobby. A door to the right led to a large dining room packed with round tables with plastic covers. Neal started through that door, but Wu explained that the room was only for Chinese citizens; foreign guests ate in private dining rooms upstairs.

“What’s the difference?” Neal asked.

“Privacy.”

Yeah, right. Privacy and the prices. Not that he really cared, the Chinese having given him the money to be Mr. Frazier in the first place.

So they climbed the stairs to a room about the size of a large den. There were three tables, but only one of them had been set. A white linen tablecloth set off the black dishes, and black enameled chopsticks with blue and gold cloisonne were set on the plates. Linen napkins were rolled in black rings, and small black china cups completed the setting. The walls had been whitewashed recently, and several charcoal sketches of bamboo leaves and hibiscus blossoms on framed rice paper had been hung. The plank floor had been painted in black enamel, and someone had gone to some trouble to carry out a “theme” with limited means. Neal didn’t think the rat that scurried across the shiny floor was part of the theme, but he pretended not to notice it and took his seat in the black wooden chair offered by the waiter. Anyway, he thought, nobody from New York had any right to be picky about rats in restaurants.

And rats always seem to know the best places, because the food was fantastic. The banquet started with a single cup of a tea that Neal had never tasted before, followed by a shot of maotai. Neal could see that Wu wasn’t much a drinker, because his face turned scarlet and he had to work hard to suppress a coughing fit. Neal hadn’t had a taste of booze in four months, and it felt good-like getting a letter from an old friend.

The drinks preceded a parade of hors d’oeuvres: pickled vegetables, small mantou with meat centers, dumplings filled with pork, and several other items that Neal didn’t recognize and was afraid to ask about. Wu exercised the proper protocol by selecting the best tidbits and putting them on Neal’s plate, a task that became more complicated as the shots of maotai went south. The last appetizers were the little pastries of red bean paste that Neal remembered from Li Lan’s dinner.

Then came the main courses: sliced duck, chunks of twice-cooked pork, a whole fish in brown sauce, steamed vegetables, a bowl of cold noodles in sesame sauce… the courses interspersed with small bowls of thin broth that cooled the mouth and cleared the palate. Somewhere in there, two or three more maotais sacrificed their lives for the greater good, and then the waiter brought out a dish of chicken with red peppers and peanuts-another one of Li Lan’s greatest hits. Neal was beginning to pray that the Hibiscus didn’t have a hot tub when the waiters brought out a tureen of hot and sour soup and then a big bowl of rice.

Neal watched Wu scoop up globs of the sticky rice and rub them in the sauces of the previous dishes. He did the same and found it was a delightful recap of the whole meal, a gustatory album of a recent memory. Wu looked as happy as a politician with a blank check.

Wu polished off his rice, leaned across the table, and said, “I have a secret to tell you.”

“You’re really a woman?”

Wu giggled. He wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t sober either. “That is the best meal I have ever eaten in my whole life.”

“I won’t tell your mother.”

“That is not the secret.”

“Oh.”

“The secret is-I have never eaten here before.”

“That’s okay. Neither have I.”

Wu broke up on that one, but when he stopped laughing he turned terribly earnest. “Why must a foreign guest come before a Chinese can eat like this?”

“I don’t know, Xiao Wu.”

“It is an important question.”

“You could eat downstairs, right? Same food.”

Wu shook his head angrily, then looked around to see if anyone was listening. “I cannot afford it. Only party cadres can afford it.”

“Home cooking is better anyway, right?”

“Do you think we can afford to eat like this at home?” Wu asked indignantly. “We have no money for pork, for duck. Even good rice is very expensive. This food is for festivals only, sometimes for a birthday…”

He trailed off into silence.

“Let’s go get blasted, Xiao Wu.”

Wu was still smoldering in resentment. “Blasted?”

“Blasted. Hammered. Spiflicated. Shit-faced.”

“Shit-faced?!”

Wu was fighting a grin and losing.

“Shit-faced. Bombed. Intoxicated.”

“Shit-faced?!”

He was off and giggling.

“Drunk.”

“It is frowned upon.”

“Who cares?”

“Responsible persons.”

“No. Cocksuckers and motherfuckers.”

That did it. Wu was doubled over in his chair, gasping for air and mumbling, “Shit-faced.”

“Where can we go?” Neal asked.

Wu suddenly got serious. “We have to go back to the hotel.”

“Is there a bar there?”

“On the roof. There is a noodle bar.”

“I don’t want any more noodles, I want us to get shit-”

“They serve beer.”

Neal signaled the waiter. “Check, please!”

Dinner should be surprises, Neal recalled as he and Wu finished off the last cup of tea at the Hibiscus Restaurant.

The meal wasn’t surprising. Li Lan had made several of the same dishes in the Kendalls’ kitchen in Mill Valley, although not as well.

“Were all these dishes Sichuan specialties?” Neal asked Wu.

“Oh, yes. Very distinctive. In fact, Chengdu is the only place in the entire world where you can eat some of these dishes.”

Not exactly, Wu, Neal thought. You can suck down this home cooking in Kendall’s dining room in Mill Valley, provided your chef is Li Lan.

They walked the two blocks back to the hotel. A cop stopped them at the entrance. More accurately, he stopped Wu, and spoke to him brusquely.

“What’s up?” Neal asked.

“He wants to see my papers.”

“What for? I’m the foreigner.”

“Exactly. It is natural you would be in the hotel. Not natural for Chinese.”

The cop was starting to look impatient, annoyed. It was the same imperious look that Neal recognized from small-minded cops everywhere.

Neal asked, “But you’ve been here all week, right?”

“Through the back door.”

Neal saw the look of painful embarrassment on Wu’s face. He was being humiliated, and he knew it. He fumbled in his wallet for his identification card.

“He’s my guest,” Neal said to the cop.

The cop ignored him.

Neal got right in his face. “He’s my guest.”

“Please do not cause trouble,” Wu said flatly as he handed the cop his card. The cop took his sweet time looking it over.

“It’s no trouble,” Neal said.

“It is for me.”

Right, Neal thought. I’m going home. Maybe.

“You mean to tell me you can’t walk into a hotel in your own country?”

“Please be quiet.”

“Does he understand English?”

“Do you?”

The cop shoved the card at Wu and nodded him in. No apology, no smile of recognition, just a curt nod of the imperial head. Wu’s own head was down as he walked through the lobby. Neal knew that he had just seen his friend lose face, and it made him furious and sad.

“I’m sorry about that,” Neal said as they got into the elevator.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does! It matters a-”

“Let’s just get shit-faced.”

The noodle bar surprised Neal. It had an almost Western feel of the dreaded decadence. The lights were low, the small tables had red paper covers and lanterns, and the entire south wall was composed of windows and sliding glass doors to give a spectacular view of the Nan River and the city beyond. A wide-open terrace had tables and scattered lounge chairs, and you could lean over the balcony railing to see the street fourteen floors below. The bar itself ran at least half the length of the large room, and it looked like a real bar. Glasses hung upside down from ceiling racks, bottles of beer cooled in tanks of ice, liquor bottles glistened on the back wall, and wooden stools provided plenty of spots to belly up. Off to the side, a cook fried noodles on a small grill, but the whole noodle bit was clearly just a gimmick to get past the bureaucracy. The operative word in “noodle bar” was Bar.

There weren’t many customers. A few cadre types were smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and having a quiet conversation at one table, while a few Japanese businessmen sat silently at the bar. The tone was subdued but not sullen. It had the feel of any late weeknight in any bar in any city in the world, and Neal had to remind himself that it was only ten o’clock. The place closed at ten-thirty.

Neal dragged Wu to the bar, lifted a finger to the bartender, and said, “Two cold ones.”

The bartender looked to Wu.

“Ar pijiu.”

The bartender popped open two bottles and set them on the bar. Neal tossed some Chinese bills down. Wu retrieved a couple and handed them back to Neal.

“Plenty,” he said.

“Let’s go out on the terrace.”

“Okay.”

They stood against the balcony wall and looked out at Chengdu. Lack of electric power made the city lights relatively dim, but their low glow made the night soft and somehow poignant. A few old-style lanterns shone in the windows of the stucco houses of the old neighborhood, while behind them the low electric lights in the new prosaic high-rise apartments made geometric patterns in the night sky. Just across Hongxing Road the Nan River made a lazy S-curve, and the lamps of a few houseboats reflected in the water.

The soft night took the edge off Neal, and the urge to get drunk left him as suddenly as it had come. He felt a little ashamed, too, about leading Wu into trouble. Better just to have a couple of beers, talk a little Mark Twain, and leave it at that.

Anyway, he thought, the kid isn’t used to alcohol, and you’re not in drinking shape anyway. Maybe they’ll let you take a scotch back to your room.

He knocked back a long slug of the domestic Chinese beer and found that it wasn’t bad. Wu didn’t seem to mind it, either, sipping at it steadily as he drank in the view.

“Can we see your house from here?” Neal asked him.

“Other direction.” He was still smarting from the scene at the door, nursing a grudge along with the beer.

Maybe that isn’t all that bad, Neal thought. If I were him, I’d have a hell of a grudge, too, and it might be better to nurse it than to forget it. Come to think of it, I do have a hell of a grudge, and I’m not going to forget it either.

“Beautiful city,” Neal said.

“Fuck yes.”

“You want another beer?”

“I’m not finished this one yet.”

“You will be by the time I get back.”

Neal held up his empty bottle in one hand and two fingers in the other. The bartender responded with the requisite two brews and even made change for Neal. The cadres at the one table stopped their conversation to stare at Neal as he walked past.

“Hi, guys,” he said.

They didn’t answer.

Neal handed Wu his fresh bottle. “Here’s to Mark Twain.”

“Mark Twain.”

“And Du Fu.”

“Du Fu.”

“And here’s to Mr. Peng, who’s coming through the door.”

Peng nodded a hello to the boys at the table and came out on the terrace. He looked pissed off, and the sight of Wu with a beer bottle in his hand didn’t do anything to improve his mood. He spoke rapidly to Wu and then stood looking at Neal.

“He is happy you are enjoying your evening.”

Meaning exactly the opposite, Neal thought.

“If he’s happy, I’m thrilled,” Neal answered.

“He says to pack your bags tonight.”

Neal felt his heart racing. Maybe they were going to put him on a plane.

“You will be gone for three days,” Wu continued.

“Where?”

“Dwaizhou Production Brigade.”

“What’s that? A factory?”

“No. It is in the countryside, perhaps one hundred miles south of Chengdu. You would call it a commune.”

“A collectivized farm.”

“As you say.”

“It’s a tourist thing?”

Peng spoke quickly.

“Foreign guests love to see production brigades,” Wu translated. “This is one of Sichuan’s best. Highly productive.”

Swell. They’re finished displaying me in the city, so we’re taking a weekend in the country. What for? More Mr. Frazier bullshit?

“How are you going to keep me down on the farm, after I’ve seen Chengdu?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Do me a favor, Xiao Wu? Last call is coming. Go to the bar and get us three beers?”

“I don’t think-”

Peng told him to go. He and Neal stood staring at each other for a few seconds.

“Let’s cut the translation crap, okay?” Neal said.

Peng smiled narrowly. “As you wish.”

“What’s the game here?”

“I have gone to great lengths to explain that.”

“You have gone to great lengths to avoid explaining that.”

“Things are not always what they appear.”

“Grasshopper.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing. Come on, Peng, what’s the deal? Why are we going to the country?”

“You do not wish to go?”

“What are we talking about here?”

“Your returning home. The sooner you go on this trip, the sooner you can go home. Of course, if you wish to delay…”

“I’ll be packed and ready.”

Wu returned with the beers and stood on the edge of their conversation. He edged forward when he saw that they had stopped speaking, and offered the beers.

“I do not drink beer,” Peng said. It wasn’t a comment, it was an order.

“Yes,” said Wu, setting the beers on a table, “it is late and we must start early in the morning.”

Neal scooped up the beers. “I’ll just take them to my room, then.”

“That is against the law,” said Peng.

“Arrest me,” answered Neal. He popped Wu on the shoulder and walked out the bar. He could feel Peng’s glare on his back, and it felt great.

Peng was furious. Until his conversation with the arrogant, rude young American, his evening had been going quite well. Persuading Comrade Secretary Xao to send Carey into the countryside had been ludicrously easy.

“I think we had better bring him closer to the asset,” he’d told the secretary.

“Yes? Why? It seems he has attracted no attention at all.”

Peng had furrowed his brow and stared at the floor.

“That is just what concerns me,” Peng had said. “Perhaps they are waiting to be sure. Perhaps the young fool is even working for the opposition. He is, after all, the only one who could actually identify China Doll.”

And that was the problem. Peng would have liked to put a bullet in the back of Carey’s skull right away, or, better yet, seen how he enjoyed a decade or two in the salt mines of Xinxiang, but the rude young round-eye was the only one left who could point a finger at Xao’s precious China Doll. Or bring her out of hiding, her and her American lover.

And the beauty of his own plan, to put that fear into Xao’s head. Manipulate him into sending Carey out as a test, and find that the test would turn into the real thing. And Xao had fallen-no, not fallen, leaped into the trap.

“Yes,” Xao said. “Send Carey down to Dwaizhou-”

“Is China Doll there?” Peng tried to keep the eagerness from his tone, and prayed that Xao hadn’t noticed the trembling in his voice.

“Yes.”

“Is Pendleton with her?”

Xao took a long time to light his damned cigarette.

“No,” he finally said. “Do you think I would put them in the same place until we know that it is safe?”

Peng bowed his head. “You are always the wiser.”

“So take Carey to Dwaizhou. If he sees her, observe how he reacts. If the police swoop in, we have lost China Doll and we shall have to keep the Pendleton hidden longer than we had hoped.”

“Surely China Doll would talk.”

“She would never talk.”

In my hands, Peng thought, she will talk.

“And Carey?”

“I would then rely on you to see he does not get the opportunity to tell what he knows.”

“And what if he sees her and keeps quiet?”

“Then we will know it is safe. You then take him on more touring to confuse the issue and send him home. End the howling of his American friends.”

“And if he doesn’t see her?”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

So the conversation had gone precisely as Peng had wished, and he had been in such a fine mood until he found Carey and Wu, inebriated and still drinking on the hotel terrace. The rudeness of the American bastard, the foolishness of Wu, to be running around outside the prescribed schedule! What if Carey had spotted the other American? What then?

Xao wasn’t furious, but he was sad. The plan would work, of course, his plans always worked, but now he would have to put in effect the operation he had so hoped wouldn’t be necessary. He had hoped to do this all without more loss of life, and now there would have to be a sacrifice.

Because of poor, stupid, disloyal Peng. It would be different if Peng had betrayed him out of political conviction, but that was not the case. Peng was merely treacherous and ambitious, with the poisonous jealousy of small minds. He had set his paltry trap, just as Xao wanted, but the trap would need bait, and Xao saw no way for the bait to survive the springing of the trap.

Neal drank two of the beers in the bathtub and sipped on the last one while he packed Mr. Frazier’s country clothes. His big night out on the town was over, and in the morning they were going to haul him down to some bucolic commune and show him around. Or show him off. So what was on the farm? What’s on any farm? Farmers, of course, pigs, cows, chickens, manure… crops… fertilizer…

Fertilizer? Super chickenshit? Pendleton? Li Lan?

He worked on the beer and Roderick Random for another hour before falling asleep.