At the Heart of the Universe (15 page)

“Yes. But you stay here today with me, we get my two children—your cousins—they are a little older than you, and you play with them and we have a banquet, and we take you to your train back to Changsha at eight. We go to their school. Tomorrow is the last day of school, and I will take them out today to play with you all day.”

“What kind of farm does my birth dad have?”

“Rice, like everybody else. I've never been there.”

“Do they have animals? Horses and birds?”

“Yes, there are many animals—water buffalo, and birds, and pigs and chickens and ducks, but no horses. There aren't many horses around here.”

“Okay, so, Mom, if we can't go meet my birth mom today, can we go
there
?”

“You'd rather do that,” Clio asks, “than stay here and meet your cousins?”

“Yeah. It'd be a lot funner to find my sister and my birth dad and his farm.”

All this talk of “birth dad” is having a strange effect on Pep. For ten years he's listened to Clio and her friends talk only about birth
mom
. Now, suddenly,
he's
here? The
other
guy? The guy who can bang out child after child, while he has to sit in the fertility doctor's bathroom whacking off to see if there are enough sperm for maybe one of their own? Images of the other guy crowd in, and he tries to push them, and him, back out.

“What's the matter, hon?” Clio is leaning over, whispering to him.

“I don't know. All of a sudden I've got to deal with a birth
dad
?
Another
dad?
Her
dad? I mean, her
dad
?
I'm
her dad, aren't I?”

“Join the crowd.”

He stares at her. “You mean
this is what
you've
been going through?”

“Every day, for ten years, un hunh.”

“Shit. I don't know if I can do it, face the guy yet. I've got to get ready for it.”

“I know. But if we can, we've
got
to have her meet her sister. Agreed?”

Pep stares at Katie. How could he deny her her sister? “Agreed, sure... But,” he whispers to Clio—but barely able to keep it to a whisper now, “but the thing is, is that the sister, well... the sister comes with a
dad
!”

“It's the price you pay.” She can hardly suppress a chuckle.

“Okay,” Pep says to Rhett. “Ask her how long it'll take to get to this farm.”

“Oh, it is far away, very far,” Ming Tao says, “a very long, hot journey. Many hours by bus, then bicycle, then on foot.”

Pep is sure she is lying. While looking her in the eye, he speaks to Rhett in a slow, firm tone, with a certain toughness he has learned from decades of closing insurance deals with tight-fisted Columbians. “We want to go meet Katie's birth father and sister and grandparents. If there's time, we'll meet her cousins and uncle too. And tell her that even though it is too long and too hot a journey, we have a van, a beautiful nice air-conditioned van stocked with cold bottled water, which is waiting for us down at the end of the street, and maybe we can all—her too—go there today, and still get back to meet our beautiful train at eight? Do you get what I'm saying here, Rhett?”

“Pep!” Clio says. “There's no need to speak to her that way.”

“Yeah, Daddy, I told you not to! And don't say ‘beautiful'!”

Pep starts to burn, but hides it. “Okay.” He whispers to Clio, “She's ripping us off. She's lying. I don't know what to believe now—it may not even
be
her sister and birth dad for all we know—I mean she's obviously on the make—but there's no risk to spending the afternoon in the bus, stopping off at this farm, and then we're gone.”

“Pep, please?” Clio has seen—in the universal woman-to-woman wordless language—that Ming Tao is picking all this up.

“Fine.” He smiles at Ming Tao. “I'll try to be more polite, Katie. Rhett? Deal.”

“Got it, big guy.” As he translates, Pep plays a little game of eye tag with Ming Tao. She listens carefully, hearing the nuance. He sees that she gets it.

“A beautiful
van
!” she exclaims, acting like an innocent who has been severely mistaken and takes correction gratefully. “If so, you can get there and back in time for your train.”

“Can we call ahead?” Clio asks. “On the farm, do they have a phone?”

“No. But first we go visit my children's school—”

“No,” Pep says. “We go
right
now.” In her eyes he sees a certain calculation, like a client trying to find the catch in the policy. He has to give her something. “Tell her that after we come back we will make a generous gift to her and her family.”

Rhett translates. Ming Tao smiles, and nods, and starts to clear the teacups.

“Do you have any photos of Xiao Lu and her family?” Clio asks. Tao says no. “Of your mother and father and—who did you say?—was it
First
Sister?”

“In those days we were too poor to have a camera.” She seems to sense Clio's disappointment, and moves to stand behind Pep and Katie. She puts a hand on Katie's head, and on Pep's shoulder.

Katie doesn't like to be touched by anyone other than Clio and Pep. She wishes she could get away.

Through Pep's thin Hawaiian shirt, Tao's hand feels
warm
. His skin tingles. He has an impulse to touch that hand. Her voice now is light, nuanced, almost lilting.

Rhett translates. “She says that she means what she says from her heart—in Chinese the saying is ‘down to earth.' Meeting you and her beautiful niece is one of the greatest things in her life. After you leave China tonight she wants to be great friends with you and a great ayi
to Katie and you
must
come back very soon. And next time you will all go together to visit her dear Third Sister up in the mountains. And one day she will visit you in America.” He smiles. “And me too. We're a package.”

Despite her sensual touch, Pep discounts this—her “down to earth” reminds him of someone saying “to be honest with you,” which only means they have some reason not to be honest and might well be lying—but he feels that he's gotten things moving in a direction that will work. He'll need to stay on his toes in dealing with these two.

Clio fingers her Kwan Yin. She sees Ming Tao as a messenger to them, much as the Goddess of Compassion is a messenger to all. A woman who has kept her beauty and savvy and created a business in the new, cutthroat China. “Tell her,” Clio says, in a hushed tone, as if the moment is both sanctified and profaned by the stark truth of their inequality, “that we'll try to meet her children and that she's welcome to come to America to see us. And that we'll come back, soon as we can.”

“I will leave a note for my husband and children,” Ming Tao says. The stick figures dance across the page, like characters onstage. She places it carefully on the table, a teacup on a corner to secure it.

Rhett hustles them out. The crowd has built. Rhett is the prow of their ship, they follow in his wake. The Chinese shout to Ming Tao. The heat clutches at them, letting go when a high shack brings a rhomboid of shade—but then knifing in again when they walk back out into the sun.

As they get closer to the van they are forced to go more slowly. The crowd is packed from the center of Mad Dog Lane all the way to the walls of the shacks, and not only is it streaming down from above but it has been drawn up from below by the snazzy Toyota van. They can see the uniformed driver holed up inside, smoking and reading the paper, ignoring the crowd and its pleas to be let in. The engine growls.

They stand there for a moment, stopped by the crush of people. Ming Tao suddenly cries out, and points to Katie.

“Look! She has the same red sheen to her hair as me.” Rhett translates. She bends down to Katie's height. Sure enough, the red glows in the bright sun. Two russet auras of the blood.

Pep can't help but stare down the cleft of Ming Tao's silk dress, to the deeper, softer cleft of her breasts, coddled in a lacy pink bra. Tao looks up, sees him looking, and smiles.
Ah, to be twenty years younger and a cool Chinese! Like Rhett!

“And,” Clio says, having to shout to be heard over the din of the crowd, “does Xiao Lu have the same reddish glow to her hair?”

“Not like me. Third Sister is the smart, shy, artistic sister, not the beautiful, fun-loving sister. Beautiful, lively, fun sister is me!”

Clio realizes that Pep is right—this woman is on the make, and suspect. The sudden weight of trusting her to be the source of all truth about Katie's birth mother and father, sister, and grandparents comes crashing down. How can they trust her? They can't, but they've got no one else. No DNA here, no. At least not this time around. And when would they ever come back?

With Rhett leading, they rush to the van. The door opens, and Katie, Clio, and Ming Tao step in. Pep, a bit panicked by the mass of people crowding around him, bounds up the steps of the bus and feels a blow come down on his head, and staggers on the top step as if he's going to tumble back down. He sees stars, hears screams—“Pep!”, “Daddy!”—and starts to topple, but an iron hand from above seizes his wrist, and two hands from below smack into his butt and give a great push and he is up the three steps into the van and on his knees, then up on his feet and being lifted by those iron hands to a seat. His hat is thrown into his lap. He wipes the sweat from his face and to his horror finds it a greasy red—fresh blood.

“Shit!” he cries. “Not again!”

“Daddy, you forgot to duck!”

“Feels like I was hit with a sledgehammer. How bad is it?”

“Very bad, Dad. It's gross.”

“Let me see, darling.” Clio takes a sterile wipe from the packet.

As she tends to Pep, Rhett barks orders to the driver to get going.

The driver, without regard for the mass of humans encircling his van like bees around their primping queen, backs up, moves forward, up, forward, and they are soon bouncing down out of the mouth of Mad Dog Lane toward the river laden with coal barges and dotted with fishermen's boats, long thin gondola-like vessels whose necks mimic the necks of the coal-black cormorants sitting in their bows, dark birds sitting as impassively as dream warriors resting up for the next battle in an ancient blood feud which, in the grand scheme of things, of course, means nothing, nothing at all.

PART TWO

In broad daylight I dream I am with her.At night I dream She is still at my side.

—Mei Yao Ch'en, “A Dream at Night”Song Dynasty, 10th–12th century

15

Forget it, they told her, when she got home late that night, forget it.

The trip back had been like a ghost trip, she like a ghost of herself, a ghostly red thread stretching tighter and tighter away from her baby for four hours until, when she got off the train again in Tienja, got off the train in the succulent dark and walked to the bus station, it snapped. But not a clean snap, no.
I am not free
, she thought,
no.
I have made a terrible mistake, for all of us—Jiwei and Xia and me and Chun—and also for this life itself because I have added to the missing, to First Sister and to my own mother and father
;
I have added to the suffering.

From the moment her husband saw her again when she got off the bus at Chindu, she saw in his eyes that he knew—despite everything—that they had done the wrong thing. And she knew he would never admit it.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“I put her in a pile of celery. She was found at once.”

“Good.”

He didn't ask her how she was. He touched her arm, but the touch seemed far away. They walked back to the bicycle. She felt like she wasn't all there, that she should be carrying something else, someone else, in a bundle in her arms.

Forget it, Xiao Lu, they told her, have another. Try for a boy.

Xiao Lu told them, “Maybe I can forget it, but I can't forget her. I see her in my mind all the time.”

They—first her mother-in-law, then her father-in-law (a kindly man, as poor farmers go), and then her husband—didn't seem to know what to say to this, and so they said nothing. They went on with their lives and assumed that after a while she would go on with her life too.



Which she tried her hardest to do. It wasn't that hard a life, not compared to how she had grown up—her family were so poor at one point that they owned only one pair of decent pants, and had to choose who would wear them. She had been born in 1962, the Year of Starvation. First, lack of rain had made the crops fail. Then the Chairman's policies made it worse. Years of famine followed, when they had gone out to search for berries and mushrooms and nuts in the hill forests, and then roots and, at the end, even the sorghum grasses that animals ate.

Now on the farm the normal rains and sun brought plenty of food, and the thick clusters of persimmon trees brought shade and the rich fruit that she never tired of eating. But the fact of the abandonment of her baby was always there, like the memory of that drought, those bitter roots that burned your lips, your tongue, your throat. Another life was inside her, a hellish other life spreading out in pain from that act of abandonment, like a defective clock, ticking.

She immersed herself in little Xia, and in working the rice paddies and wheat fields and fava bean fields, and in cooking and cleaning and sewing, but it was always as if she were doing it left-handed, or at a slight distance. In the distance was not just her baby but her baby's unknown life and fortune—where she had been taken and who she was with now. There was never a question of whether or not she would survive. Chun was a sturdy baby, much more sturdy than Xia had been, and she had seen her rescued from the celery, and knew which police station and which orphanage she would be taken to. Xia had always been frail—maybe from the hepatitis she had shortly before getting pregnant—and had caught every cold, and sometimes in the dusty seasons would have frightening attacks of wheezing. She grew up small and delicate. Xiao Lu worried more about Xia's well-being than about Chun's.

Forget about it, they all said.

I can't forget about it, she answered.

Your problem, they said, is that you can't forget about it.

She tried to act as if she had forgotten about it.

And it worked, for a while. Her acting as if the pain were gone was helped by the hellish work of the second rice harvest that summer. Once the rice had ripened, it had to be harvested quickly. Every hand was needed, and although Xiao Lu could have stayed in the compound with Xia, she left her with her mother-in-law and went up the foothills with everyone else to the rice paddies. The work was backbreaking. It started before dawn, at the sound of the village boss's gong, went through the whole white-hot day, and ended after dark. A thousand years ago the paddies had been carved up onto Black Dome Mountain in dragon-backed plates, flooded and drained by an ancient system of bamboo pipes. The curving dams of mud served as footpaths, and constantly needed repair. Despite the height of the mountain, the heat seemed to reflect off the water of the paddies rather than be tempered by the altitude. The hard work with the sickles on the rice stalks was made all that much harder by having to constantly climb up or down, the only level place being the paddy itself.

Xiao Lu was unused to this work. She had grown up many hours away in a less mountainous spot, where the river was more central than the hills, and where the crops were soy and wheat and lychee and sugarcane and fish. Because of Xia and the pregnancy with Chun, she hadn't worked in the fields in several years. Now she found it exhausting. She was not used to going out in the cool predawn and, when she stepped into the mucky water to start cutting, feeling all kinds of animals slithering and nipping at her feet—eels and worms and water rats and the odd startled frog and all kinds of voracious insects. The knee-high rice stalks cut her uncalloused hands, and raised welts on her arms and face. Her back, unused to constant bending, ached so that shooting pains went down her left leg and her toes tingled constantly. Her legs cramped and trembled. The Hunan summer sun was relentless. The time until the lunch break seemed a white-hot eternity.

It was harsh, hard, painful work, but as each day went on her pain began to feel more welcome to her. Not only did it, for little spaces of time, obscure the memory of actually having placed her dear baby in the pile of celery, but it also felt like just retribution for what she had done. Her huge conical straw hat hid her face from the others, and hid their world from her. Nights were easier. Exhausted, Jiwei fell asleep instantly, snoring—she didn't have to rebuff his unwelcome sexual advances. Even though she was filthy with sweat and itchy from bug bites the size of small acorns, with Xia close beside her she too would collapse into sleep, into the enigma of her dreams.

The work never stopped. After the second rice harvest, the fields had to be prepared again, to try for a third. There was plowing and seeding and fertilizing to do. Many paddies were too precariously placed on the mountain for water buffalo, and had to be hoed and seeded by hand. The night waste had to be hauled uphill from the village for fertilizer, in two five-gallon plastic cans balanced on a bamboo yoke across her shoulders. Again, the stench was a perverse comfort, one of guilt and retribution.

Through that second rice harvest and immediate first plantings of the new seedlings for the third crop, through the fava bean harvest and the picking and drying of the persimmons, and then into the autumn and the planting of the winter wheat, all through this, the ancient rhythm of the farm, Xiao Lu maintained a sense of calm, and gave the appearance that she had forgotten. To everyone except her husband—and perhaps her daughter Xia—she seemed almost back to normal.



But that year the winter was early, and harsh. The family house had been built partway up the mountain, for protection, and despite its carefully chosen spot in the lee of a hill, if the wind shifted to come out of the east, the weather was fierce. That winter would turn out to be one of the worst. It started with incessant rain and then came windy sleet and hail and even snow—almost unheard-of at that latitude and altitude. Luckily for the family, it was the quiet season for tending the crops, and much of their time was spent sitting around the coal fire. They were lucky in another way—there was a coal mine not far from them, on the west side of the mountain, and they were friends with a man who hauled coal to the nearby village. Every year he would drive his horse and old wooden cart with car tires up to the farm and unload the cheapest grade, glistening rough black rocks of coal, which would last all winter. To Xiao Lu it was always a frightening sight—the horse, the cart, and the man were black, covered in coal dust. Rather than a farmer's straw hat, the coal man wore a floppy train-engineer's cap, and his coal-streaked face showed white only in his eyes and, when he ate, his teeth. Everyone else seemed to like him, and he often spent the evening drinking rice wine with Jiwei and his father. They got drunk, told stupid stories, and laughed too loud. She alone was fearful of him. When Jiwei asked her why, she couldn't tell him. Maybe because he limped. She had always been afraid of cripples.

The bad weather was the beginning of her undoing. All of them were forced to stay inside, keeping warm with the coal fire in the big main room, the fire throwing its light onto the large Mao poster, which, to her, seemed a threat. As she sat there staring into those intended-to-be-seen-as-benevolent eyes, she started to count off, as if in one of her mother's prayers to the Buddha or her other kitchen gods, the ways that each great grief in her life had come from the Chairman's orders: famine, “landlordism,” lost sister, crazed father, and now, lost baby. As the family chattered, she clicked each of these over in her mind like pieces of a game played with bones on an alabaster stone. While she could hide her grief—it had turned, with time, from a sharp knife slash to a dull ache—she could not hide her distraction. The farm family, unlike her own but like most of the families she had come to know in her life in western Hunan, could not abide frank feeling, but were acutely sensitive to anyone's distraction, figuring it meant a hidden plan that could not be good for them.

She became the focus of their attention, by it not being directed at her.

“She's gotten even more quiet, Jiwei,” her mother-in-law said.

“She's always quiet.”

“But not like this. She sits there, but she's not there.”

“She's all right, Mom.”

“No, she is not. Watch her carefully. Get her pregnant again soon.”

But her husband knew what no one else knew. She did not want to get pregnant again.



When he had first approached her sexually, a few days after she had come back from Changsha, she had refused him, saying that she was too upset to start in again so soon. At first he had been understanding, and she appreciated it enough that she in fact was the one who initiated their lovemaking. She did not tell him that she had been to the village doctor for pills. Several months went by, with no pregnancy. She had gotten pregnant easily—within two months—the first two times.

“She got birth control,” Jiwei's mother said to him after three months.

“How do you know?”

“I asked my friend to ask her friend to ask the doctor's wife.”

“Did you get birth control?” Jiwei asked her that night.

“Yes.”

“You don't want a son?” he asked, astonished.

“I do. A son would make me very happy, very proud. But I can't know if it will be a son or another daughter, and I can't stand giving away another daughter.”

“What can we do?”

“Wait. Maybe I will change my mind.”

She tried very hard. But whenever she envisioned being pregnant, her mind filled with the memory of the increasing horror she had felt when she was pregnant with Chun. At the start of that pregnancy, to give the baby up if it wasn't a boy had just been an idea, something in the air, an expectation, not talked about. But as the pregnancy went on, especially when the baby started to kick, she began to live with the portent of it being a girl. It was a strange new feeling, of being of two minds. Up until that time in her life, she had usually seen things as simple, based on pragmatic solutions to problems of food, clothing, shelter, shame. Even injustice of the kind that had rained down on her family had been clear—it came from the Chairman, and they were unlucky enough to have owned a little land and a house that they had rented to others. And if it had led to the Red Guard putting a dunce cap on her father's head and hanging a sign that said “Landlord!” around his neck and during the New Year celebrations with firecrackers popping like pistols parading him down the main street of their village in front of everyone and then loading him onto a fisherman's boat and rowing him up and down the river, the fisherman's cormorant sitting like a sentry in the bow of the sleek narrow boat—well, it was understandable, they were just following the Chairman's orders. And if, as soon as the Chairman died, there were new orders, and if millions of lives had been lost because of the old orders that were now wrong orders, and tens of millions more lives, connected by fine threads to the dead, had been ruined—First Sister's among them—well, how to understand that?

“Karma,” her mother had said to this question. “We have bad karma.”

It was not satisfying to her, but she had nothing else to satisfy her, so it would have to do.

This was virgin territory for her, to yearn for the baby and fear the baby, to carry a vision of nursing a sweet-smelling little baby and then have the vision darken when she saw it was a girl. By the end of the pregnancy with Chun she was hardly eating, and feeling half-crazed. The trip to Changsha made her feel more so.

“I can't go through that again!” she said to her husband.

“You have no choice,” he said tensely. “To live here we need a boy.”

“I can't bear giving up another girl, I would die—I can't do it.”