Ying Ning had done this kind of thing before. Had to have. She’d shaved the hair from around the wound on Bao An’s head and sewn back the flap of skin with neat quick movements of the hands. Bao An had cursed with pain all the way. Cursed Ying Ning, cursed the Chinese men who’d attacked him, cursed Stone and Carslake. At the end of it all Ying Ning doused the wound with iodine and started on the gash across his cheek. Stone was reminded of the way she’d done the collagen injections for him back in Hong Kong.
Carslake was nervous that some one was onto them now. Bao An had been attacked not far from the little house, in the darkness. Ying Ning knew better.
‘Those Chinese boys fight over me,’ she said, somewhat callously in front of Bao An. ‘Bao An make mistake to fight back. Maybe he run next time.’ Ying Ning was smiling a little too harshly. Stone could see what she was up to already. That was Bao An out of the picture then. Had she been testing Bao An? Flirting with those guys at the pool table to test him? Bao An should have ignored it. As it was, he was history, Stone guessed, and the other guy Lin Xiaohong with him. Stone saw it was Ying Ning’s way of winnowing out her followers before they went West to find the Machine. She could be a callous bitch, Ying Ning. Stone thought back to when she’d tried to seduce him in Shanghai. Maybe that was a test too. Stone could only assume he’d passed the test by turning her down.
While Ying Ning cleaned out the gash on the side of Bao An’s head, Carslake stood fascinated. The shaven patch on Bao An’s head was like a monk’s tonsure slipped over to the side, stained with purple-brown iodine. He’d be wearing a bandana like Carslake after this. That wouldn’t please him much.
Carslake’s eyes showed his mounting surprise as he watched Ying Ning work. Finally he spoke under his breath to Stone. ‘What is this girl, a fucking surgeon?’ he said, with genuine appreciation for once. Then he spoke loudly to Ying Ning, the booming, patronizing voice he always used to her. ‘You should leave this Commie wasteland behind, honey, forget about this dissident crap. You could get a real job back in the States.’
Ying Ning’s glance at Carslake was predictably contemptuous. ‘Sure,’ she said, her calm fingers laying butterfly crosses onto Bao An’s cheek. ‘I could be a good little Western slave girl, with biiig mortgage loan and credit cards,’ she said with the wry, dismissive smile. ‘I could spend all my money on fashion and swallow all that shit they feed you on TV.’
‘We don’t have to watch TV, honey. We don’t have to do anything. No one tells me how to think. Can you say that in China?’
‘They can tell me what to think,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to listen. They can tell me what they want. I don’t listen.’
That was true. Ying Ning wouldn’t listen. Whether she lived in China, the US or in the middle of Antarctica, she wouldn’t listen. She was supposed to be a Marxist, but unlike so many dissidents, Ying Ning wasn’t out there parroting anyone’s philosophy. It was the world according to Ying Ning, and it was a tough place for anyone who got close to her.
Ying Ning concentrated on repairing Bao An’s face, but when she finished, she turned to Carslake and stood, with one hand on her hip and the other holding a cigarette. Bao An silently stood up to light the cigarette for her, then sat back down. He was her bitch, this Bao An, and about to be dismissed from service.
‘It’s true. Your country is freer than mine,’ she said. ‘For now. But my country is getting freer. What about yours? Americans so worried how free are the other countries, what about yours?’
Carslake snorted at her and dismissed the offer of a cigarette for once. ‘Chinese shit,’ he muttered under his breath, and stalked off into the other room.
Ying Ning the dissident, political activist. That was the image. But an image created by her loyal followers in the Chinese blogosphere. The Fox Girl, hunted and hounded, making her way by cunning alone. She was always on the edge, but she would not stay quiet and she would not betray her cause. That was the image.
The reality was different. Ying Ning did fight for a cause, but the cause was Ying Ning. She was not part of a bigger movement. Those two Chinese guys — Lin Xiaohong and Bao An — they were lapdogs. She was using them, in the same way as she’d use any of her followers.
Ying Ning was OK, Stone reflected, so long as you happened to be useful to her. To have any relationship, you had to be useful to her. It wasn’t enough to agree with her. Very many did agree. She’d achieved much with her exposes of low wages, suicides and bad conditions. She’d achieved far more at any rate than all those dissident intellectuals and artists, shut up in their studios in Beijing, blogging about “civic society” and “democratic institutions” till their readers’ eyes bled with boredom. Ying Ning wanted to fight things, and she’d do the same whatever country it was. She’d do it in the US, or Switzerland or Sweden.
The good thing about Ying Ning was, she made you think about yourself — your motives, your honesty. What about Stone? What was he fighting for? To expose, to embarrass, to change — like Ying Ning? Stone had achieved some things, he’d give himself that. And he’d achieved them without shooting people, which he was proud of. But like Ying Ning, he was on his own side, and that was all. He had more people to help him than she did. His life was more of a compromise. All that business of no possessions, no bank account, no car. It was a public image and Ying Ning had seen through that immediately. It was a public image for a man who claimed to have no public image. It was also tactic, a way of staying below the radar, although everyone assumed it was some kind of personal political statement. Stone didn’t like that. Because political statements are simply justifications for what you want do with your life.
And Stone knew perfectly well that “justification” is another word for “lie”. As Ying Ning pointed out, Stone was paid by a university, even if it was in cash. Where Ying Ning ignored rules and laws entirely, Stone used the rule of law. He relied on it. He used the laws of England, of America, of Sweden to get his message out. True, the more of a problem he became to the authorities, the more their commitment to the rule of law was strained, and the slanders, smears and bogus charges had started to come out. But all in all, Stone was less of an outsider than he cared to admit in public.
Contrast Ying Ning. Right now, Ying Ning was an outlaw in China — but even that was a sideshow. Her life was more like performance art — a living act of dissidence and rebellion — occasionally poetry. She did everything for herself, and that explained her lack of morals. If it was useful to Ying Ning, it was OK. That was her moral code.
Ying Ning was an artist, Stone was a “warrior for peace”, but both had plenty in common with that screwball UFO-hound Carslake. It was the need to discover, the need to know which drove them, the thing they had in common. When they found the Machine, and uncovered what made Semyonov flee to China, all three would be happy for knowing and for the act of finding out. Not one of them expected fame or fortune out of it.
Stone followed noises into the tiny bathroom, and found Carslake, lovingly unwrapping the long rectangular box he’d collected from the Fedex office in Chengdu.
‘This baby,’ said Carslake, with a voice of hushed awe, ‘This baby’s going to tell us everything when we get up there in the hills. Ground penetrating radar. This will give us 3D images to a depth of five kilometers underground. If anything’s hiding down there, this thing is going to find it.’ He spoke as if it had been his idea to bring the equipment, whereas he’d been following Stone’s specific instructions. Which was all to the good.
After what had happened earlier, Stone insisted they would leave first thing in the morning. They would travel towards the Tibetan border by bus at first light.