Govern a family as you would cook a small fish-very gently.
The thunderstorm seems to have chased summer out, and the October air is clear and cold. The call could come at any moment-we’re poised to spring into action-but the passage of time has actually made us less clutchy, curing us somewhat of our frantic American impatience. A kind of temporary peace has settled in. In our newfound forbearance, Mary’s fur coat makes sense all at once; I never understood that it could get chilly here. Even the acrylic sweater she gave me comes in handy; I wear it every day. Gone is the totalitarian pollution-there are gaps in the one-party smog-which I was actually getting fond of. That luscious ivory-gray smoke, with its tinge of fish stink, it’s become part of me, and me of it: We’ve been respiring together, China and me. Larry and I have been in Shi five weeks, in China a total of six, and without warning we’re witness to a lovely succession of serene, cloudless days, so clean we can see the tops of buildings at last. There they are, the uppermost windows with the shades wide open. It’s like having been held captive by someone who finally decides to be your friend and whips off his mask so you can see that his eyes are startling blue-like Larry’s!
For Larry has undergone a transformation, too. In the past six weeks, he’s been yanked away from everything safe and reliable in his life and been exposed to trauma and fear. Broken down to his core, it’s like he’s been depatterned so he could be reprogrammed. Long story short: He’s sampling parts of chicken that have not once in their lives been encased by KFC Styrofoam.
“Even if I don’t care for the food, it’s always arranged nicely,” he concedes.
But he is caring for the food! He’s switched loyalties from KFC mashed potatoes to Chinese sticky rice and has developed a hankering for Chinese eggplant. He even shows remarkable aptitude for chopsticks.
“Hey, you’re okay with those things,” I say.
“You eat enough takeout, eventually you pick up chopsticks,” he says.
Of course, “remarkable” is a relative term. Truth to tell, he uses chopsticks like a toddler uses paintbrushes: one in each hand, and both operating independently of each other.
But there’s no gainsaying his palate, which continues to prove far better than mine. We play a blindfolded tofu-testing game, and he blows me away. He’s letting down his guard in other areas, too. He relaxes enough to skip shaving on the days he’s scheduled for dialysis, figuring that the procedure is draining enough without his needing to get groomed for it. (To pick up the slack, I’ve taken to shaving more frequently, in case Dr. X decides to bestow a kidney on someone with a more reputable-looking companion.) Larry has also stopped begrudging me the time I spend with the Badminton Boys, even though he still contends they represent the competition (“kidneys don’t grow on trees,” he says, and he’s right). It’s all part of the general world change brought in by autumn. Fewer firecrackers are being sounded, as China gets back to business after its holiday season has passed. The dewy, stalwart Jade comes and goes several times with quickie visits, making sure all’s running smoothly for us. No more beaten-up toenails are on view, because everyone is thickly shod. Summer’s over.
Meanwhile, in what may constitute the greatest change of all, Mary is adding what Larry insists on calling a womanly touch to our cave: arranging his clothes according to season, sweeping his discarded pistachio shells into corners, even bringing a pet into our lives, sort of-thumbtacking onto the wall a scroll that features a goldfish that’s way too big for its bowl. It looks like it barely has room to turn around, but Mary says proudly, “We make nice home for him…and we, too!”
Yes, her English is improving. She immerses herself in her workbooks and now understands perhaps every fourth or fifth word Larry says. It’s not perfect-she’s still capable of breaking into squalls of laughter when asked how her parents passed away-but there’s enough common language between them that they can have a conversation like the following:
“Larry, you like so many food! Lunch and every day dinner, many!”
“I even eat the soup you got me, despite the floaters.”
Mary is proud of herself. “I order! Me!” But mostly she is proud of her beau, beaming over him like a mother panda at her cub. “Big appletite!”
Larry chuffs on orange soda going down the wrong way. “You should have known me in my prime, Mary. I could walk into any McDonald’s in Florida and eat two helpings of their apple pie.”
“Two?”
“Two!”
They smile and take each other’s hands, smiling happily.
“She’s also opening up about her family,” Larry reports. “Mary, tell Dan what you told me this morning about your son’s girlfriend.”
“Morning.”
“Tell Dan. What you told me. About the girlfriend.”
Mary wears her getting-ready-to-spit-out-pig’s-knuckles expression. Then her face brightens unexpectedly. “I-ah like my son girlfriend. She has degree in ah engineer. But I not ready. Ah. To be. Grandmutha!”
“Hear that?” Larry says proudly. “She’s even picking up my speech impediment!”
Great: a new generation of Chinese speaking Larryspeak. Like a new generation of Chinese dancers dancin’ the Dan.
“Good for you, Mary,” Larry says. “Tell Dan the other thing you told me this morning. About fate.”
“Fit?”
“Fate, remember Mary?”
Blank face, hard-to-describe mouth expression.
“Any case,” Larry says, “this morning Mary tells me, ‘Fate make us together.’ Isn’t that nice? I thought that was a very thoughtful concept.”
But it’s not as simple as that. Mary’s also learning enough language to express her discontent about certain issues. “Ah, ah,” she begins, marshaling her English, “I wish to do for Larry,” she says. “Do more.”
“I know you do, and that’s nice, but no,” Larry says. “Enough is enough. There are some things that are just too intimate.”
“What does she want to do, Larry, you don’t mind my asking?”
Larry looks discomfited, like he’s just been told he’s wearing someone else’s jockstrap by mistake. “Sing to me.”
“And why won’t you let her, exactly?”
The jockstrap is chafing. “My mutha sang to me, she’s the only one.”
Well, this is personal. I stay out of it, looking down at the pistachio shells in the corner.
“I want please you. I study…hard!” Mary tries again, her voice breaking. “Now I want sing!”
“And I appreciate that,” Larry says, squeezing her hand.
“I go back my home if no let me sing you.”
I lift my head. This is not the statement of someone who’s entirely out for her own aims.
Larry studies the proposition on the table so starkly before him.
“You win,” he says.
“You do it?” Mary asks. “You let me?”
“I said you win. I’ll win the next battle.”
“Yay-yay,” Mary mouths silently, ardently. She turns Larry’s hand in hers, lifts and kisses it with her eyes closed. And it’s like a snapshot that makes history the instant it’s taken. In that simple gesture, my heart warms to her at last. Click. Open and shut. Case closed.
“That was easy,” I say to him.
“I don’t have any fight left in me,” Larry says. “I just shut up and do what everyone tells me.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard all month.”
“Surrender is becoming second nature.”
Me, too, I think, carrying his kidney-shaped bedpan to the toilet without cringing-though I don’t say such a thing aloud. Couldn’t if I tried. He’s off and running again, not letting anyone get a word in edge-wise. “I even feel like accepting myself more, too-and note please that I’m saying this before my surgery, so it’s not like I’m getting some mystical infusion of wisdom from the donor’s kidney-”
“Shhh,” I say, hushing him so we can hear what’s beginning to happen: Mary singing a little country tune, standing still in the middle of our cave, almost too big for her bowl.
And Larry listens from his bed with his eyes closed, in pain or pleasure, it’s impossible to tell, but just maybe it’s not pain.
“You know, Dan,” he says, signaling me to come closer and keeping his voice low, “in my earliest phone conversations with Mary, two years ago, she was so ashamed she couldn’t speak English that she would try to sing to me. I would cut her off at the pass, of course, but she did manage to get in an occasional note here and there.”
I look at Mary’s face as she warbles, the muscles of her throat working with so much sincerity it’s almost frightening. “Why didn’t you tell me that detail at the get-go?” I ask. “I would have softened to her then and there.”
“That’s why,” he says. “I needed you to stay objective.”
“Not too dumb, Feldman.”
“And I still do, Dan,” he says. “I still need you to keep your eyes open. It’s not over till the fat lady sings.”
Well, perhaps not the best image for him to use right here. The fact is, the fat lady is singing, and it’s putting another lump in my throat. Must be something in the air…
Meanwhile my voice. My Chinese accent is coming along nicely. “Damn dim bulb!” has become my all-purpose curse phrase of choice. Hot water running out? “Damn dim bulb.” Phone on the blink? “Damn dim bulb.” Also, when I find myself wading through a gang of card sharks playing Chinese blackjack on the sidewalk, I provide my own running commentary so they don’t have to: “Oh, look you at the crazyheart American Cowboy! He wear socks! Isn’t that beyond the humor? Instead of normal ankle stockings. And look, he drink water from a bottle he carry slung around shoulder. What a crack-up and hot card! What madcap business of monkeys will him think of next? No wonder we giggle on top of giggle as he pass. He may as well be of clown hat! But look you, now him writes in pad with characters that are not Chinese! Is there no tomfoolery this screwballs will not perform to keep us up-stitched?”
Funny thing is, they seem to grasp my self-parody instinctively. They get what I’m doing and clap me on the back as I walk through.
But whether the Disapproving Docs appreciate what I’m up to is more questionable. When I get a fresh e-mail from the Docs (“once again we must remind you that we are not willing to clean up any mess of your devising, if such a situation presents itself”), I use the opportunity of a return e-mail to perfect my Chinese accent.
“Greeting to you, dear doctors! Hello and hope this mail meet you in a perfect condition. I am happy to inform about our receive a winning organ for our dear relative Larry. Presently we locate in ASIA CHINA for transplant project of our own effort. But we do not forget your past help despite that it failed somehow. Even offer to clean mess of our devising! But no mess, sank you very much. In fact, because he is lucky number xxx transplant of season, Larry has win lottery bigtime, and we want include you in total sum payout. Please contact our secretary name MR MARY so he send you million-dollar Cheque to cover all you concern, however failed. And remember alway, the Cheque she in the mail.”
As for other accents, the Chinese people continue to sound more like Larry and he like them. Or maybe he sounds more like Ali Baba un-reeling his narratives from dusk till dawn, or dawn till dusk, whichever applies. It all evens out. Who’s keeping score? For that matter, I continue to lose any ability to see a difference in the way people look. The Chinese look American, the Americans look Chinese, together we all look Arabian. And why not? Why should we be just us and they be just them? We are invincibly interchangeable. Artie the KFC delivery-man, who now spends his off-duty hours sitting on the foot of Larry’s bed listening to the lullaby of Larry’s Ali Baba tales, has come to look so much like my old pal Miles back home that one time I feel like saying, “C’mon, Miles, are you putting me on? Have you just applied a little Chinese makeup and snuck over here to check out what’s happening?” Another time I’m watching Chinese TV and an interview comes on with Jackie Chan, and I say to myself, “Wow, nice to see an American face once in a while.”
Of course, none of this means we can’t still be competitive with one another. I’ve entered the Badminton Boys’ round-robin tourney and been steadily working my way up the ranks till I’m contending for the semifinal doubles playoff. It’s Pakistan and America versus Saudi Arabia and Qatar, cutthroat but quiet in the little hallway.
Cherry looks on approvingly. “Very springy, Daniel. You reminding me of Israeli patient last year.”
“You had a patient from Israel?” I say, almost losing a lob in my surprise. “How’d he get along with…everyone?”
“He faced with same difficulty as everyone, so became brother to brother,” she says. And I can believe it. The Giant Mushroom is sort of a no-man’s-land, an island of neutrality in a world of shooting, machine-gunning, bombing-we can hear it through the windows…
Oh, wait, this is a nation at peace, for the time being. Must be the sound of hammering, drilling, digging. All around the hospital are the sparks of welders, the roll of cement tumblers, the spray of pressure hoses. One wing of the hospital is demolished overnight. A new wing appears in two days. All is as wirl with change except in our ninth-floor cave where we’re suspended, waiting out our time as the dynasties inexorably rise and fall through the Shang, the Qin, the Shun, the I Ching… Who knows how many eras are passing or even where we are? I could be in China, for all I know.
Time at its most basic consists of waiting, and wait I do, either in my half of the cave or back at the Super 2, waiting till nightfall to emerge, like the fair ladies of old China who wouldn’t go out in the sun lest it ruin their porcelain complexions. I have everything I need in my room: yoga CDs, scallion bread, chocolate, Bengay I borrowed from Larry that really helps my strained neck. The concerned housemaid knocks and knocks until I finally open up. “Clean you room?”
“I no need,” I say, waving my hand no.
“I no need?” she says, furrowing her brow.
“I’m happy as a clam in here,” I say. For I truly am. Two-week-old water stains dating from the time of the Ten Kingdoms? I won’t look at ’em. Annoying little alarm that goes off every time I open the hall door? I’ll keep the hall door shut. Other than Larry-Mary, I deal with very few people in the world besides my strapping housemaid, with blue stitches in her chin. For a while I feared they were whiskers, but she shows me close up that they’re the ends of blue threads. Did her husband bust her one? Another Inscrutable. I’ll never get to the bottom of it. More like my den mother than my housemaid, she took me under her wing weeks ago, one time hemming the waistline of my pants, which had gotten two inches too big, another time showing me a photo album of her husband and son. This time she snaps the skin-thin green rubber glove off her hand and roughly rubs my bare knee to indicate that it’s too cold to wear shorts.
“I know, but I’m hot!” I say. “I’m on fire because we’re getting Larry the last kidney in China. Now all we need is for it to happen-with no mishap!”
But she’s tricked me, taken advantage of my loquaciousness to sneak past me into my room with her vacuum cleaner, which is missing its wide-mouth nozzle attachment. Back and forth she goes, up and down, with just the naked end of the pipe-inch by inch to catch a stray crumb or chase down a thread, leaving a network of graceful squiggles on the carpet. Was this how Chinese calligraphy was born in eons past, I amuse myself wondering-from a deficient vacuum-cleaning system on a wall-to-wall?
But Dr. X was right. I do miss my boys. I’ve been putting off calling home, saving it for a treat. Usually, when I’ve called around the globe before, the connection has been more crystal clear than the one through the wall to Larry’s room, but this time it’s distant, faded like a coloring book left in the windshield of the family car. Plus, the voices on the other end seem a little more matter-of-fact than is my liking.
“How’s everything, Spence my man?”
“Fine, except when we play Scrabble, Mom keeps insisting that ‘bizou’ isn’t a word, and I’m positive it is! Just because it isn’t in the dictionary only proves what a stupid dictionary it is, because I’m positive.”
‘ “Bizou,’ huh?”
“When I said ‘slopey’ was a word, I wasn’t positive, but with ‘bizou’ I’m positive, I know I’ve heard that word.”
“No doubt you have.”
“And don’t say that just to appease me, Dad, like how you agreed when I said we should send Jeremy to live in another family. And while we’re on the subject? Jeremy keeps saying he’s deeper than me just because he cries at American Idol, but I don’t think that makes him deep. I think that makes him temperamental.”
“I KNOW WHAT TEMPERAMENTAL MEANS!” comes a voice from another phone line being picked up.
“Jeremy, I’m having a private talk with your brother. Can you wait your turn, please?”
[Click.]
“Spencer, you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Can you speak up? It’s a little-”
“I am speaking up.”
“You know, whatever your brother is or isn’t doesn’t take away anything from you,” I say. “You’re two different individuals, with two different needs and wants, like…um, like…”
“Like you and Larry,” he says.
“Yeah, like me and Laurence,” I say with a mock French accent-but he doesn’t remember the reference. How has our little motif bitten the dust in just a few weeks of neglect? How fragile are our connections? While I was throwing my net vines wide here, were they withering at home? Uneasy, I change the subject. “So what’s the deal, no new awards to report? What happened, you fall off the wagon again?”
“Demon rum, gets me every time. But seriously, Dad, I have a serious request to make. Did you mean it back on the chairlift when you said Mom could be hell on wheels?”
“Of course not, honey. We were just fooling around. What’d you think?”
“I think we all should be kinder with each other, all the time.”
“Even when everyone knows we’re just fooling around?”
“Yes, because people are very hurtable, Dad.”
I’m silent from my side of the world. For some reason I think about how kind everyone in China has been to me the past six weeks-even the dry cleaner across the street. When the band was coming off my panama, the lady in the dry-cleaning shop stood there stitching it back on for fifteen minutes, and when I displayed my wallet to pay her, she wrinkled her nose at me and pushed me out the door.
“Sold,” I tell him. “Kindness it shall be.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Thank you, Spence. You’re a wonderful young man.”
“Well, I’ve got a pretty good vocabulary, anyway, I guess…”
Then it’s his little brother’s turn. “Hi, Dad.”
“Wow, Jeremy, you sound subdued.”
“That’s ’cause I hate my brother.”
“Wow, for real you do?”
“For real. I wish he weren’t even living here.”
“Sounds pretty bad. If he didn’t live there, how long d’you think before you’d miss him?”
Jeremy calculates. “At least two hours,” he says vehemently.
“Well, I can only pray that your relationship will survive,” I say. “Tell me what else is new. How’re your inventions?”
“I don’t make them up anymore, that was stupid… OH, BUT, DAD! DAD!” he says, exploding into capital letters at last. “I MADE TWENTY BUCKEROOS AT MY LEMONADE STAND YESTERDAY!”
“Jeremy-how much of that is exaggerating?”
Spencer picks up another line. “It’s true, Dad. For once he’s not lying. One guy gave him like sixteen dollars for a single cup.”
“Thanks, Spence. Can you let me resume talking to Jeremy privately now?”
[Click.]
“Uh, Jeremy. What else did the guy want from you?”
“Nothing, Dad!” He’s back to lowercase letters, less enthusiastic, bordering on annoyed. “Why are you so suspicious, Dad? It’s like you hate America! You think everyone’s out to abuse us.”
“Okay, so long as you keep the lemonade stand on our property.”
“I do, Dad! What do you think, I’m a friggin’ idiot?”
“Jeremy, when’d you start using language like that?”
“Dad, it’s just, remember how I always used to say that if you were my age, you’d be my best friend?”
“Yeah, I love that.”
“Well, I still think that, but you force me to use extreme language. You have to understand, things aren’t like that in America anymore. Maybe you’ve been gone so long you don’t remember.”
“I have to agree with him, Dad,” Spencer says, picking up his line again to add his two cents. “Not everyone goes around molesting everyone all the time. That’s a pretty dark worldview, Dad. You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers over there. Maybe the Chinese have brainwashed you by now.”
“Spence, are you off the computer yet?” Jeremy asks.
“Give me five more minutes, Jeremy, and it’s yours.”
“Guys?” I say, trying to break in. “It’s fading out here, guys, can you speak up?”
“Three more minutes?” Jeremy begs.
“Four.”
“Oh, thank you, Spencer, thank you, thank you, thank you-”
“Hey, Spence?” I interrupt. “I was in the middle of a conversation with Jeremy, and then I want to speak to Mom-”
[Click.]
[Click.]
I’ve lost them both. Guess they’re used to my being away by now.
And so I walk. Each night I sneak out before my den mother can see-except that she always sees, mutely racing up to me to straighten my shirt and primp my hat before pinching my cheek good-bye-and rack up ten or twelve miles walking. It’s not to alleviate loneliness; I feel at home here. Nor is it to kill time; time’s not my enemy. It’s merely walking, walking without firecrackers, walking for hours without heat or sorrow, walking over potholes like a mule bred to be sure-footed-no more ankle twisting-walking past shut-down warehouses with people shouting inside with words that sound like me talking to myself in my dreams, or like commentary from a Bizarro local travel channel:
Under cover of nightfall, the crazyheart American Cowboy emerge from his lair. Here he go now, blinking at dusky moon. What the devil he up to? Ah, now we see, he want prowl space-age nightclub. See how blue smoke explode in face, how mighty bass make Cowboy hat vibrate. Cowboy amazed when bartender juggle Hennessy bottles behind back and over head. Cowboy unshamed when open bathroom door and find it janitor closet. Cowboy flattered when two women ask to dance. They not dancing the Dan, he happy to see. They want be Cowgirls, he think, but white high heels too big for feet-look like white rain boots for little girls to splash in puddle. Splash! Splash! Cowboy splash, too! Having fun! Women think funny! Then women think weird. Cowboy feelings hurt. Cowgirls lead Cowboy to back room, where help him play electronical darts. For hundred RMB. What the hell, Cowboy play. Cowboy get bull’s-eye. To celebrate they want sell him clove-scented cigarettes, also hundred RMB. Many RMB later, Cowboy leave. Take off sweating sucker hat. Regard how hair is thinning. Let this be lesson!
Yes, lessons are learned, even as mysteries are solved. Not that the mysteries are such big deals, but solving a few does make me feel that China is not impossible to understand, that there are reasons for things being how they are. China is scrutable!
INSCRUTABLES…SCRUTED!
Inscrutable of the stockings: Because the Chinese live closer to the soil than we do. Even in the cities, mud cakes and flying dust are a part of daily existence. Ankle stockings are merely a matter of keeping the dirt at bay.
Inscrutable of the bus squat: It’s not avoiding pee, as Larry thought-it’s patience. Or strike that, it’s sufferance, long-suffering patience, the best way to wait for a bus that may never come. Not knowing if and when the Princess will ever come, I myself find it restful to hunker down like this sometimes, and a good stretch, too.
Inscrutable of the gradual stairs: It’s to keep the population sedate! American steps are pitched steep to reflect, or augment, our rush. Here the effect is calming, making you either patient or docile, depending on your point of view. Maybe Chinese history can be measured in the pitch of their stairs, I think, taking them three at a time.
Inscrutable of the lullaby music: Same deal. I’ve been noticing watered-down American lullabies everywhere lately, as hold music on phones, as background Muzak in hotel elevators. For a mighty nation, China sure does like to infantilize its subjects.
Inscrutable of the cab honking: It’s taken me a while to crack the code, but the Queen Latifah cabbie was my Rosetta Stone, her “long, long live” honking enabling me to extrapolate what other honking means. Sometimes it’s instructional: You’re driving the wrong way. Other times it’s argumentative: You may not think you need a cab, but I’m here to convince you otherwise. Usually it’s celebratory, though, honking for the sheer vitality of it, an expression of cabbiness the same way duck honking is an expression of duckiness.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. I’m a quack, after all, just here for a tiny while, with training in absolutely nothing. But I’ll be damned if things don’t seem fraught on these night walks, scrutable yet infinitely unknowable at the same time. An older bus driver is watching me from his elevated seat as he waits for the light to change. It takes him just a glance to get all the information he needs to know who I am and what I’m about. How I instinctively turn my shoulders a centimeter to indicate that I won’t be trying to cross the street in front of him-our subtle animal intentions on display every second no matter what we do. And I’m doing the same with him: reading, analyzing, deciding. What a miracle it is to see a person. You can decode his whole history and the history of his race in an instant’s expression and bearing. The exposure nearly makes me giddy. And yet at the same time, our knowledge of one another is infinitesimally small. Haven’t I just scratched the surface with Larry?
For the mysteries go on and on. The mystery of the dead chef on the sidewalk, of any dead body anywhere, is one I hope not to solve for a long time, and certainly not on this journey. Nor have all my doubts been laid to rest; new ones are surfacing all the time. China’s still a repressive, centralized society, trained to think in lockstep-I see it every time a cabbie resists having the destination changed mid-ride, every time a waiter refuses to modify an item on a menu-and these are the people I’m expecting to bend the rules for an illegal kidney? In one TV music video, a man’s chasing his girlfriend headlong down the street, but at a crosswalk he halts and waits until the lights indicate it’s okay to resume his chase. These are the folks I’m banking on to break the law for us?
The doubts keep pace with the mysteries; the best I can hope for is to maintain some sort of balance. All in all, along with the climate change, I find myself graced with a second wind: I have new patience for Larry, new regard for the place I’ve landed. I’ve been living nearly two months among people I was brought up to fear, and I have experienced nothing but generosity and compassion everywhere I turn. If it weren’t for sorely missing my wife and sons, I’d be content to stay here indefinitely. In fact, there are moments when I find myself almost dreading the day the kidney comes through. I want nothing more than for the scallion bread to keep supplying me my daily nutrition; for Jade to keep hopping two-footed off her bullet train on her quickie visits from Beijing; for the badminton tournament in no-man’s-land to go on and on; for Chinese calligraphy to keep being scripted onto my carpet with a naked vacuum pipe, up and down and sideways; for the hammering and drilling and bass playing at nightclubs to continue so loud it makes the hair on my bare legs quiver-country on the move!-and for everyone’s cooties to keep gloriously commingling. Despite the perils and unknowns-maybe because of the perils and unknowns-I want to be nowhere else than right here, doing what I’m doing. Is it okay to be happy being here, doing this? Falling in love with China?
Because I am.