Dream of the Blue Room (13 page)

NINETEEN

Just after noon the following day, we dock at Shashi. Dave is nowhere to be seen. He didn’t even come to the cabin last night. He has stopped keeping up appearances. Perhaps I should be angry or depressed, but I can no longer muster the proper emotions. He has already begun to recede into the past, something dreamlike and faded, while Graham feels increasingly like the real and solid present. We go into town together and have a delicious lunch of vegetables, beef, and strong tea at a small restaurant near the entrance to a park.

After lunch, Graham says he wants to visit an old friend in town. “You can explore the park. I’ll meet you at the entrance in three hours.”

It’s raining softly when he leaves me at a pavilion near a small pond flickering with koi. The columns of the pavilion are decorated with colorful tiles in intricate designs. In another pavilion on the opposite side of the pond, a man in a pinstriped suit sits meditating. I take out my journal and begin to scribble, thinking that one day I’ll want to remember this. When I get home I’ll try to locate Amanda Ruth’s mother and share my impressions of China. I remember her face the day she gave me her daughter’s ashes, the way she showed up at my door in big sunglasses and wrinkled slacks, her hair tied up in a green bandana. She looked unkempt and somehow younger, like a lost and frightened teenager.

Rain spatters the pavement. I’ve been sitting here for about ten minutes when an attractive young woman approaches me. She is wearing a yellow sundress and an expensive-looking pair of leather sandals, and her toenails are painted pale pink. She sits in the middle of the bench, right next to me, though there is plenty of room on the other end.

“Hello,” she says. “I am Yuk Ming. You speak English?”

“Yes. My name is Jenny.”

She’s wearing tiny gold hoop earrings and a diamond ring. My first guess is that the ring must be costume jewelry. Most Chinese workers would never be able to afford such an extravagance. “You are American?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“I meet much Americans,” she says eagerly. “I try study English. My English very poor. I want one day visit New York City.”

“Your pronunciation is extremely good,” I tell her. It’s true. Although her English is broken, each word is spoken precisely, with perfect inflection.

She points to my journal. “You write for newspaper?”

“No, it’s just a diary to help me remember the trip.”

“You are in China for vacation?”

“Yes, taking a cruise up the Yangtze.”

“Oh! Is very beautiful. Longest river in the world!”

“Third longest,” I correct her, though I immediately wish I hadn’t.

“No, I am certain it is the longest.” I change the subject. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I am administrator in hospital.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“In China today all people like their work, not like America. In America everyone hates their work. Isn’t this true?”

“Some people do. Mine’s okay.”

“How much they pay?”

“Enough.”

“Here, workers treated very well,” she says. “Pay is not too high, but is okay, because employer pays medical expense, housing, everything. No homeless people in China.”

“Do you have children?” I ask, hoping to urge the conversation in a more personal direction.

“I have one son. He is seven years old. Very bright!” And then Yuk Ming is suddenly praising the attributes of the one-child policy. “To have one child is best. More is too many. If one child, you have time to spend with him, you can be perfect mother.”

If I wanted to be inundated with propaganda, I’d be touring the city with Elvis Paris. I smile and stand to leave. “It was very nice meeting you.”

“Don’t go!” she says, smiling. She stands and touches my arm. “I am very interested in talking to you and sharing a cultural exchange. Please come to my home for lunch.”

The abrupt change in my new acquaintance’s English is startling. Maybe she’s reciting these last sentences from a textbook on getting to know foreigners.

“We will have a nice walk,” she says. “I will show you some pretty spots.” More perfect phrases. It must be a very good textbook. I accept her invitation, excited by the opportunity to see a real Chinese home, not the tourist attractions that Elvis Paris is so intent on dragging us to.

“I just have to make one telephone call,” she says, pulling a slender red cellphone out of her purse. She turns it on, dials, waits for a voice on the other end, and then says something quickly in Mandarin. She slips the phone into her purse. “Let’s go. You can share my umbrella.” Rain patters the leaves of trees lining the street. As we walk, Yuk Ming hums softly. The floral pattern of her umbrella is reflected in the wetness of the street. Our own reflections bob side by side—mine slightly taller, hers slightly thinner. “What music do you like?” she asks.

“Louis Armstrong. Nina Simone. Ella Fitzgerald. I don’t admit it to many people, but I also have an addiction to eighties bands like Culture Club and Simple Minds. Have you heard of them?”

“No, but I like some American singers—Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson.” She begins humming “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

“Perfect,” I say.

“Oh!” She seems pleased. “I do not know the words, though.” I sing them for her, badly off-key, and she laughs. We turn left and through a narrow alley. A dozen shirtless young men work atop a pile of rubble, breaking bricks with pickaxes, while a group of elderly women pick through the charred remains of a gutted building. They all stop to stare as we walk past. Then, in the midst of all this destruction, a brand-new building appears, a ten-story high-rise covered, like so many of the new buildings in China, with gleaming white tile that looks like it won’t survive the year. I imagine it is a new Chinese invention, the disposable building: use once and then discard, no cleaning necessary.

“Here we are,” Yuk Ming says, folding her umbrella and shaking the excess water onto the building’s tiny patio. She punches a series of numbers on a keypad, and the door clicks open.

We take an immaculate elevator to the tenth floor and walk down a long hallway. When we’re about a foot from her apartment, the door opens, as if choreographed, and a handsome young man in pressed khakis and a checked button-down appears. Yuk Ming introduces him as her husband, Wang. “We are very pleased to have your company,” he says, shaking my hand.

Everything in the apartment smells new: paint, carpet, furniture. Yuk Ming proudly gives me the tour. The apartment has two ample bedrooms; one has a queen-sized bed with a black satin coverlet and a small chest of drawers. A framed picture of badly painted flowers hangs on the wall beside a small window. “And this is my son’s room,” she says, sweeping her hand in the direction of the second bedroom. In another life, she could have been Vanna White. The miniature mattress in the corner is covered in Mickey Mouse sheets; something about Mickey Mouse looks not quite right, although I can’t put my finger on it. And then I realize that his ears, instead of the signature black, are crimson.

“Here is our comfortable and efficient study,” Yuk Ming says, opening a sliding glass door to a third and smaller room. The desk is of the same shiny black material as the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and on top of the desk is a brand-new computer. Like Mickey Mouse, there’s something not quite right about the computer. It takes me a moment to realize that it isn’t plugged in. There are no cords, no printer, not even a keyboard, just a huge monitor and a CD-ROM tower. On the wall are three photos in identical black plastic frames: one of Mao Zedong, one of Jiang Xemin, and another of a small boy standing in front of a fountain, arms straight at his sides, looking surprised and slightly frightened. “My son!” Yuk Ming says. “He is in school right now.”

“He’s very handsome.” I lean in closer and see that the photograph of the boy is actually a postcard.

Yuk Ming grabs my shoulder and pulls me back. “Why don’t we have a seat in the den and get to know one another!” I feel as though I’ve stepped onto the set of an American television show, circa 1970. I half expect Yuk Ming to whip up a tuna casserole and show me her Tupperware collection.

The sofa, which is upholstered in black velour, looks as though it has never been used. The entire apartment, in fact, is strangely devoid of life. It bears no resemblance to the dozens of Chinese-owned flats I saw in New York’s Chinatown while apartment-hunting with a friend. Those apartments possessed the comforting air of having been lived in. They were filled with the fragrance of food, with potted plants in varying degrees of health, crowded with chairs and couches and beds and tables that had clearly been put to good use. There is something decidedly un-Chinese about this apartment, as if Yuk Ming and her husband are trying to present to me a sanitized version of Chinese life, minus the dirt and hardship, the jumble of friends and relatives, the noises and odors and small disasters of daily life. This is Communism Chic, the New China, the goods they want me to deliver to the folks back home.

“Well,” Yuk Ming says, flashing a Marcia Brady smile, teeth so white she could be the poster girl for Sparkling Baiji Toothpaste, “this is a typical modern Chinese apartment.”

“Very nice,” I say.

“Now we will have lunch in our comfortable dining room,” Yuk Ming says. She leads me through the kitchen into a small room, also closed off by a sliding glass door. On the table is an impressive spread: dishes of pork, fish, chicken, steamed rice, several kinds of dumplings, an array of vegetables arranged expertly on dishes with delicate floral patterns. A carved white bowl in the center of the table contains shark fin soup. Yuk Ming pours tea and adds something to my plate from each dish, before she and Wang help themselves.

“This is delicious,” I say, relaxing. “Where did you get it?”

“Wang made it,” Yuk Ming says.

This is impossible, as the kitchen is spotless and I’m sure, if I were to open the door of the refrigerator, I would find it empty. Over lunch they ask me about my family, my job, my husband. They want to know if I’m enjoying my journey, and I please them by saying that China is fascinating. When they ask why I decided to come here, I lie. “I’ve always wanted to see China.”

After lunch we retire to the den. Yuk Ming brings in a bowl of translucent white lichees for dessert. After I’ve eaten several, she asks, “What do you think of our wonderful Three Gorges Dam?”

The question catches me by surprise; I weigh my words carefully. “Many well-known Chinese scientists and engineers are worried about this dam.”

Yuk Ming and Wang look at each other and laugh nervously. Wang takes the lichee bowl into the kitchen. When he returns, he pulls a chair right in front of the sofa where I’m sitting. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and says, “There are very few true scientists and engineers in China who feel this way. Those who speak out against the dam want to frighten the people and undermine the government. The dam is very good for China. China produces many products for your country and the rest of the world. We need electricity to make these products. And too many people die each year in the floods. The dam will save lives.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but what about the farmers who rely on the floodplain for their living?”

“The government is building clean new villages for them,” Yuk Ming says. As if to prove her point, she hands me a brochure that is sitting rather conveniently on a small table beside the sofa. The brochure shows photographs of children playing happily in front of modern apartment buildings. In one photograph, behind the bright clean building that the photographer obviously meant to capture, is another building, also modern, but already falling apart. Yuk Ming explains that this is Ling Bau, a model resettlement village thirty kilometers from Yichang. “The government built enough new homes for all of the families of Yichang. Every apartment has a television. It is very good for the people.”

Flipping through the brochure, I am reminded of an afternoon at my studio apartment in New York City during my freshman year of college. It was four months after Amanda Ruth’s murder, and I’d been struggling through the spring semester in a daze, unable to complete my assignments, often missing class, going for days at a time without seeing anyone other than Dave, who would arrive at my door with John’s pizza or takeout Chinese and persuade me to eat. It was 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon and I was still in bed. Dave had been gone since the previous Saturday, down in Florida for some seminar, and in his absence I’d lost all sense of time. There was hardly any food in the apartment, the phone had been disconnected, and my textbooks sat unread in a backpack I hadn’t touched in a week. The doorbell rang, but I ignored it. It rang again, and I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, wondering who it could be. A couple of minutes passed in silence, followed by a knock at the door. I got up and put on the only thing I could find, a blue T-shirt that skimmed the tops of my thighs. I tiptoed to the door, hoping the visitor wouldn’t hear me, and peered out the peephole. There was a young man standing there—no one I recognized. He was wearing a white button-down and dark tie. His hair was blond and perfectly combed.

He knocked again. “Hello? I know you’re in there.”

“What do you want?”

“May I have five minutes of your time?” I was looking out the peephole, and he was staring directly into it, as if he had some psychic power that alerted him to the fact that I was watching him.

“Who are you?”

“I’m with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

“I’m busy.”

“I’d just like to speak with you for five minutes, ma’am.”

“How do I know you’re not some psycho?”

He slid a card under the door that identified him as John Slattery, member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After the identification card came a pamphlet entitled
Sharing the Good Word
. “I won’t hurt you, ma’am. I’m here to talk to you about the love of Christ.”

“Just a minute,” I said. I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and put on lipstick. When I came back and looked out the peephole again, he was still standing there. Out of curiosity, possibly boredom, I opened the door and stepped back. He glanced down at my bare legs, blushed, and looked away. I shut the door behind him. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked. “Coffee?”