You cannot fight a fire with water from far away.
Commotion. On the next Sunday, I’m being driven from the Beijing airport through the sweltering smogshine that feels like a moist anvil on my head. I’ve managed to hustle an assignment from a magazine to report on the changes in Beijing since I was here twenty-five years ago-airfare and all expenses paid for one week. The hotel package comes complete for six days with this Red Flag limo, mercifully air-conditioned, and a fetching tour guide. Very fetching.
But what changes! Ole BJ has been buttered and Botoxed for the Olympics. Once a low-lying labyrinth of grainy neighborhoods, it now reminds me of Kryptonopolis in the early Superman comics, a futuristic metropolis with soaring trains and heatstroke-inducing architecture. All the feverish activity of twenty-five years earlier-men and women scampering across bamboo scaffolding like ants on a picnic plate-has resulted in a supersonic McCity of gleaming chrome and smoked glass and blue kryptonite-duplicator rays, for all I know. The effect is akin to going from the run-down department store that is your everyday life, with its faulty fluorescents and grimy escalators, into a strobe-lit video arcade. Snap, crackle, zap! Instead of those grandmothers you could still see a quarter century ago shuffling through the rag stalls with bound feet, movie starlets with French pedicures are mobbing the malls, impatiently stamping their designer sandals. The tour guides have changed, too-twenty-five years ago they were tight-lipped and severe, hiding their little hair buns in gray Mao caps. By contrast, the luxurious Yuh-vonne from Happy-Go-Luck Travel bounces flirtatiously, with nuclear pink highlights in her pageboy that’s like the mane of a punk thorough-bred.
“I like you shirt, blue and green!” Yuh-vonne says vivaciously, sitting in the leather-seated back with me while the driver bullies his way through the circuslike traffic. “Blue and green is good omen in China. Green thimble-ize humanity. Blue thimble-ize heaven, divine, all that. Red, what does red thimble-ize?”
“No idea: blood and death?”
“Oh, you are clever one. Hairy homeboy, you make deep impression! No, red does not mean blood and death. It mean longevity! So many thing in China mean longevity! Ward off evil spirits, blah, blah, blah. Quiz at end of car ride, ha, ha.”
“What is this?” I ask, pointing at a four-story computer store pulsing orange beams through the milky air like a space-age lighthouse.
“‘What is this, what is that?’” Yuh-vonne mimics me. “You so curious man, ask many question. I like curious man, but not too much!” she says, tugging playfully on the brim of my panama hat.
“Hey, look,” I say, “Mamma Mia is playing in Beijing!”
“Hey, look,” Yuh-vonne says, “what are you job?”
“Free-range writer,” I say. I’m in an okay mood because my nonstop scoot from Denver was so short it felt like a nap-not even long enough to incur bad breath.
“Ow my God,” Yuh-vonne says, hiding her smile with rhinestone-covered fingers. “A writer, my God!”
“Believe me, it’s nothing to get worked up about,” I inform her. “We’re a dime a dozen back on the East Coast.”
“But not travel with family? Selfish bad boy!” she says, jabbing me playfully in the ribs. “I only joking,” she resumes, for the record. “Your wife is a considerate girl. Beautiful, too?”
“Oh, yes, very. Very.”
Yuh-vonne is momentarily subdued enough to adopt a serious tone. “Yuh-vonne not my real name,” she says. “My Chinese name unlikable for you, so I take name I read on Web site for my favorite TV show. You know Batman, Adam West, all them dogs?”
“Yvonne what’s-her-face? The one who played Batgirl?”
“See resemble?” she says, flitting her long eyelashes. “But correct pronunciation Yuh-vonne.”
“But it’s French-”
“Your bad! I read on official Web site!”
“Whatever,” I say. “And you can call me WillandGrace.”
“Ha ha, that’s a humor one!” Yuh-vonne laughs, slapping my knee. Aren’t you supposed to slap your own knee when amused? I can’t remember. I’m forgetting my American customs already. The flirtatiousness is making me a little light-headed, though I remind myself not to take it personally-beautiful Asian women often waste their wiles on undeserving Western visitors, just in case we’re higher up on the food chain than we necessarily are. Anyway, I’m fascinated by her laugh, which is more like an openmouthed bray, before it turns suddenly into a rough bark at the driver, who executes an extreme left turn across four lanes. Lesser cars scurry to acquiesce, for the sole reason that we’re bigger and shinier. At home if a limo barged through like this, he’d get the finger at least, but here everyone clambers to the curb as though we were a shiny black fire engine.
“I can’t believe this traffic,” I marvel to myself.
“You prefer last time, only bicycles, eh?” Yuh-vonne says.
“That’s right. But how’d you know I was here before?”
“Fact file,” Yuh-vonne says, yanking a bright red three-ring binder onto her lap. “Free service kindly provided by my agency. Have you age coordinates, you food preference, even you college transcript. Not so good in French language, we note, maybe that why you have problem with my fine name?”
I’m not sure if she’s kidding and all those pages are merely the itinerary she’s worked up for our week together. But the laugh’s on her in any case, because I didn’t even take French in college-further evidence that Chinese surveillance, if that’s what this is, is more Keystone Kops than anything else. A fact I learned to my amusement and horror twenty-five years ago, and one that even Yuh-vonne seems ready to concede.
“But fact file have sorrowful gaps,” she goes on, “as to what-is-you-mission, what-is-you-choice-liquor-recreation, so on so forth. You fill us in, please, so we make accommodate as possible.”
“Well, it’s true I’m partial to bicycles,” I say, relaxing into a reminiscence. “The whole way in from the airport last time, we were practically the only car, it was past midnight and the driver kept his lights off to save gasoline, flashing them from time to time to light up the swarm of bicyclists everywhere. Then we had these banquets twice a day that called on us to make these amazing toasts-”
“What-is-you-mission?” Yuh-vonne barks, so severely that she reminds me of the guides of twenty-five years ago.
I weigh the question. Only a few minutes in the country and here it is already, the first test of my undercover chops. I’m aware that this is the moment I’m supposed to be super-surreptitious in this top-secret assignment of ours. But you know what? Surreptitious isn’t going to get me where I need to go. Furthermore, Yuh-vonne doesn’t seem to know such basics as my arrest here last time. So much for her alleged “fact file.” Even if she were a Keystone Kop, I wouldn’t judge her a threat.
“I’m here to help my cousin Larry,” I say.
A statement that sends Yuh-vonne into eye-flitting mode again. “Laurie is handsome?”
“Whoa!” I say, almost bumping my head against the ceiling when we run over an unknown object. The pause gives me time to be judicious. “Well, he has a certain animal vitality,” I reply. “If you’ve ever heard of a guy named Al Goldstein-publisher of Screw magazine, squat and tough-Larry looks sort of like him, minus the cigar. Kind of the friendly family pornographer type, but you know he could deck you with a sucker punch if he wanted to.”
“He bald as billiard ball?” Yuh-vonne asks.
“Great head of hair, I’m happy to say. Women find him endearing.”
“Now is talking turkey!”
“Yeah, well, he’s a charmer when he chooses, with a razzle-dazzle smile despite a couple of teeth knocked out when he was a kid. And he uses these quaint expressions from an earlier age when chivalry wasn’t quite-”
“Cutting to chase, what are he job?”
“Hard to describe,” I say.
“You not like Yuh-vonne enough to try?” she says, pouting. She also slaps my wrist. Not that playfully.
“Okay,” I say, “you’ve probably never heard of a professor packing a semiautomatic before.”
“True that!”
“Well, I exaggerate,” I say. “Or rather he exaggerates. He calls himself a professor, but really he’s just an adjunct at some Catholic college down South, with links to the underworld and a sometimes-lucrative sideline of suing people. Mostly he’s an inventor of get-poor-quick schemes. The latest one I heard was Canine Kippahs, yarmulkes for dogs, though that might have been one of my inventions I was trying to sell him. That’s the thing about Larry: He’s so much like a part of you that you don’t want to admit, you start to think like him after a while and come up with wacka-doo schemes yourself. At least I do. But the point is that everything the guy’s ever touched has turned to dust. He’s been close to making a million dollars more times than I can count, and always at the last minute he blows it, like he’s programmed to self-destruct over and over again.”
“Bottom line, he is unemployed?” asks Yuh-vonne, a little winded from working to stay ahead of me.
“Always been his own boss,” I clarify. “He’s an operator, a finagler holdover from the Old World, which is why the rest of the family’s kind of embarrassed by him, a throwback to the ghetto-the kind of shtetl gangsta some of us may have been before we all evolved into Ivy League doctors/lawyers/Indian chiefs.”
“I want meet him!” Yuh-vonne says.
“Let’s let him rest till tomorrow,” I say. “He was scheduled to get into his hotel late last night and must be exhausted. He’s got a lot on his plate the next few days.”
“What on he plate, exactly?”
Here it is again, another moment when the rule book calls for caution. But caution works best, sometimes, when thrown to the wind. I’ve decided to try to enlist Yuh-vonne’s help.
“We’re trying to find him a kidney transplant,” I say.
Yuh-vonne betrays no emotion at this news. “But so then Laurie is Chinese?”
“American. Why?”
“How he can use Chinese kidney?”
“We’re all brothers and sisters under the skin,” I say. “In fact, come to think of it, that may have been one of the toasts I made twenty-five years ago. Let me think a minute…”
“I am suspicion of that biology,” Yuh-vonne says. “Look me in the eye.”
“It’s true, organs aren’t race-specific,” I say. “So Larry and I’ve had a couple of conversations, and the plan is, we’re giving it one week in China, and if nothing turns up, we’ll try the Philippines, then maybe Singapore and Hong Kong, see if we can shake something loose.”
“You one sunny-side-up dude. How you go about it?”
“Haven’t the foggiest yet. Black market, maybe? Is there maybe a Kiwanis-type club for kidneys or something? Networking one way or another, isn’t that always how it goes?”
“Hmmm,” Yuh-vonne says. “You have contacts?”
“Only a distant one,” I admit. “Some embassy friend of a friend I e-mailed the night before I left. But I have something better than contacts. From my previous visits, I have a sense of how huge China is and how things tend to fall through the cracks. One hand doesn’t know what the other’s doing, plus the law isn’t applied equally. There’s even a proverb that says the farther you are from the emperor, the less you can hear his voice. Meaning things are a little looser away from the center of-”
“I mean contact lenses,” Yuh-vonne interrupts. “Your eyes behold me so bright!”
“Oh,” I say. “Must be the pollution.”
Yuh-vonne has one word for me. “Guanxi.”
“Guanxi?”
“Connections. Meaning it more depend on who you know to get things done, personal relationship under radar, so to procure what you desire without no one knows.”
“Perfect,” I say. “So I’ll jump right in by asking if you have any leads.”
“I? Ha ha ha.”
“What about our driver?”
Yuh-vonne performs a double gesture, one hand waving no, the other to her lips with a shushing sound. “But why no relative depart him with kidney?” she asks in a whisper.
“Well, that’s a sad story,” I say. “Larry had a twin, Judy, who would have been the ideal donor, but she was chronically depressed and killed herself last year. By the time they found her, the kidney was beyond salvaging. And the rest of his immediate family’s gone. He’s all alone in the world, except for the larger family that he’s alienated because he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”
“This of course not microchip you speak about.”
“No, more like a gigantic grievance because of the way the family is structured,” I say. “See, he’s the son of my grandmother’s baby sister-technically, he’s my first cousin once removed-but the family dynamics were such that he was born into a different class from everyone else. My grandmother was this regal Boston lady, kind of like a prettier Eleanor Roosevelt wrapped in a Persian lamb collar, but by the time her baby sister was born, eighteen years after her, her parents had fallen on hard times and the sister ended up marrying a lovable but illiterate garage mechanic who kept having strokes. Shall I go on?”
“You talk like roller coaster! I like!”
“I know it’s a lot,” I say. “Getting this close to Larry must be going to my head. So anyway, they were good people-‘salt of the earth,’ in my family’s rather patronizing phrase-but Larry always felt he didn’t measure up, even though he’s compensated for it by getting a million degrees.”
“They no like him?”
“They appreciate a lot about him-his fight, maybe even his lack of pretense-but not the baggage that goes with it. He truly has a heart of gold unless you cross him, which he feels some members of the family have-”
And then suddenly there he is. Not Larry but Mao-twenty feet high and airbrushed since I last saw him. Hanging above the main entrance to the Forbidden City, his portrait looks younger than before, a little less weary and a little more cheery, more like a slightly menacing Ronald McDonald than the wart-faced tyrant of yore-the despot as Fred Flintstone. Twenty-five years ago, I got a bout of dysentery walking beneath him, but this time, squinting through the smoglight, I feel a family connection-that roly-poly skepticism, that chunky bullheadedness-so help me, he looks like a Chinese version of Larry.
And of course, across from the portrait looms Tiananmen Square, still as gargantuan as ever. Last time it was a geologic anomaly: the largest public square on earth, the size of ninety football fields. But this time it reminds me of the infamous student massacre, which offers me a chance to turn the tables and ask Yuh-vonne some questions.
“Do you know what happened here?”
Yuh-vonne winks lasciviously. “Inside those walls, emperor spend so much time playing with his concubine,” she says.
“No, not inside the Forbidden City,” I say. “Across the street in the square. In 1989.”
Yuh-vonne quickly averts her gaze. “Our elders will not tell us,” she says. “Many time we ask them, but they say don’t ask.”
“Do you know that students were hurt here?”
“A few,” she says carefully. “That about it.”
I bring her gaze back to me with a hand on her shoulder. “Not a few,” I say. “Hundreds. The tanks rolled right over them when they were protesting.”
“Ow my God!” she says, sucking in her breath. “I have to go tawlet!”
“Seriously?”
“No, I can wait,” she says, but she looks constipated suddenly, buttoned up.
On the square as we drive past, children are flying kites and shrieking. Young women are ambling through with frilly little ankle socks. Old women are limping along with parasols held high against the sun. But where are the people my age? Where are the Red Guards of the seventies who performed such monstrous deeds against their countrymen, to say nothing of the Tiananmen Square student protesters of the late eighties? They couldn’t all have been massacred here, could they? Or do they avoid this spot? Come to think of it, I’ve seen hardly any people my age since arriving at the airport.
Mostly what I see are soldiers, skinny adolescent soldiers everywhere, clumps of sunken-chested, pimply boys at rest, horsing around in their olive green uniforms, fragile boys encased in weaponry, roughhousing with one another, bored and playful as boys anywhere, putting one another in headlocks, dropping spit bombs before smearing them into the concrete with their boots, snapping cell shots to send their mothers. Boys.
“You know the Cultural Revolution?” I ask Yuh-vonne.
“It-take-place-’67-to-’77,” she says in a flat tone. “But I didn’t born then.”
“What do you think of it?”
For the first time, I see that her lips are bitten up, self-inflicted, bespeaking an inner severity at least as harsh as any state-sanctioned one. “Maybe-a-good-thing-in-beginning-but-then-a-bad-thing.”
“So where the hell are all-”
“People nowaday very happy and rich,” she says, to shut me up at last. As if on cue, we get cut off by a limo even bigger and shinier than ours.
“We only poor limo, but he rich rich limo!” She rolls down the window and sticks the upper half of her body out. “I love you, China!” she shouts, arms outstretched.
And off we speed down the avenue to my hotel a few blocks away, the damp furnace of China ’s summer air blasting in through the open window.
“Over the next few days, I’m going to be in need of some rather non-traditional tour-guide services,” I tell her when we get there. “You available to step off the straight and narrow?”
“I am at your service night and day,” she says.
“Bingo,” I say. “What’s the forecast?”
“Smoky.”
As I open the car door, a flash of something comes back to me. I turn to face Yuh-vonne. “Jong may, jong moy…?” I say experimentally, trying to remember the toast I knew twenty-five years ago. “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples: jong mee?” But it escapes me.
Yuh-vonne disregards my effort and grips my hand meaningfully. “Night and day,” she says.