Dream of the Blue Room (22 page)

Walking alone through the empty streets, the sound of my shoes slapping the pavement. Down by the docks, a few lonely sampans knock about. A middle-aged man beckons, shouting a sweet adulteration of my name. In the note, Graham told me to look for the man who knew my name. He told me to go with him. Now, seeing the boatman with his weathered sampan, his shirtsleeves rolled over muscular tanned arms, I am struck by Graham’s generosity. In his last days, he was thinking of me.

I remember him standing in the pavilion near Poyang Lake, his arms wrapped around my waist. “The best travel is the kind that takes me so far away that I know I can’t get home in a day or two,” he said. Now, surveying the river, the small sampans captained by men whose language I do not understand, the mountains towering so high I cannot see their peaks, I know that getting home will be no easy task. I have plenty of currency, but no guidebook and no guide, no rules of order, no common language with which to find my way. And finally, I understand what Graham meant: to be away and adrift, distant and foreign and lost, alone, is to be somehow free.

I step into the sampan and point upriver. “Chongching,” the man says. I nod. He gestures toward a board that stretches across the center of the boat, a few inches from the floor. I sit. He dips his bamboo pole into the river, and we begin to move away from the bank. The sun shoots out from behind a dark column of clouds. The river is a wide green sheet, beckoning and docile. The mountains tower above us, sharp cliffs of emerald and gray. Something flickers, a flash of silver rolling along in front of the sampan. And then it is standing, treading water, its nose pointing toward the sky, its belly shining in the sunlight. Stunned, I turn to the man, wanting to know if he has seen what I have seen. “Baiji,” he whispers, awestruck. The dolphin dives underwater and disappears downstream.

For several minutes the man stands still, the pole resting at his side. He has not turned on the small motor, and instead allows the sampan to drift. He scans the river, waiting. To our right, the abandoned city. To our left, the buildings of the new city, their white tiles gleaming. Small waves slosh against the wooden sides of the boat.

I remember a summer afternoon in the blue room with Amanda Ruth, the two of us lying on towels on the stern of her father’s boat. The boat knocked about, rising and falling as Demopolis River moved beneath us. The water cast light on the ceiling; its reflections shifted and turned. Amanda Ruth was stretched out and sleeping, the dark tangle of her hair draped over the pastel patterns of her towel. Her arm was brown and bare from shoulder to fingertip, the small hairs bleached golden, a birthmark the size of a quarter just below the elbow. The smoothness of her arm, the faint sweet smell of her skin rising in the afternoon heat, a grain of sand caught on her eyelash, a bit of broken pine straw tangled in her hair. The boat lifted and lowered, lifted and lowered. She made a sound, so quiet I almost missed it—nothing more than a sigh, a letting go of air.

Fifteen minutes later, the man is still motionless, searching. He is on his knees, peering out over the edge of the boat, his eyes inches from the surface, as if he can see through the murky water. Meanwhile, we are drifting. The sampan rocks and turns. The man’s face strains with anticipation. He is waiting for the baiji to return, as if he believes this is a thing that could happen. It occurs to me that he is a man of great patience; perhaps we will wait like this for an hour, or more. I imagine my own eyes growing heavy, my body tired, as he kneels there at the bow of the boat, waiting.

I imagine us drifting through the night and into morning, into the next day, and the next, on and on through months and seasons until the river begins to rise. I imagine the surge of the river as the gigantic walls of the dam lock into place. The river rises, spills over the docks, crashes through the windows of little huts that line the bank. It rushes up the lonely streets, sweeping up pots and pans and bicycles and beds, teacups and linens and shovels and doors. The Yangtze washes through the lobby of the Hotel Tien, past the broken vending machines, the useless chandeliers. It bursts through the darkened elevator shaft, sets the small bed afloat, table, chairs, syringe, bottle, teapot. Graham.

The water comes suddenly, one strong swift current, like a storm. The town drinks the river in, sweet and wet, one long deep drowning drink.

From the hillsides then, one will see a lake spanning endless miles—a clear blue lake, and deep. Ships will glide along its surface, and it will look, to some, as if the river has always been calm, a shimmering mirror on the edge of a vast metropolis. It will look as if the life of the river is above. But there will be a memory, still, buried deep in the bones of this new city. The memory will be of another, older city, one that lies below the surface. A memory of houses and temples, of winding streets and fertile farms, of wagons and boats and people. The city will not be visible, but it will be there, underneath and barely sleeping. It will be there, like a memory of girls and husbands and lovers, a sweet unshakable knowledge. The city will not be gone, it will only be waiting.

The day grows cooler, and clouds begin to gather. Meanwhile, the man kneels and watches, but the baiji does not return. Finally he stands up, turns to me, and speaks. Although I can’t understand his words, I sense that he’s looking for some indication that I am tired of waiting for the phantom dolphin, some sign of impatience that tells him I think it’s time to move on. He looks back and forth from me to the river, awaiting my response. “I’m in no hurry,” I say, leaning back and resting my head on a bundle of clothing. Water slaps against our tiny boat. The man leans over the side of the sampan, his face close to the water, and then, shyly at first, he begins to call. It is a high-pitched, whining sound, almost a squeal. He looks back at me, laughing, beckoning me to join him. The sound is not easy to imitate, but I try. The afternoon passes in this manner, two strangers attempting with inadequate voices to raise something from the depths.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Hedgebrook for giving me time and space to write; Mr. King Yiu for the apartments in Beijing and Hong Kong, and the room with a view in the Empire State Building; Elvis Paris for the translations; Doug Stewart, Jay Phelan, and Bill U’Ren for good advice; Wiggins for the monkey story; and Wade Williams and Tracy Singer for the intangibles. Thanks to Sonny Brewer and Frank Turner Hollon for their role in the original publication of this book with MacAdam/Cage. My gratitude to Caitlin Alexander and the team at Bantam for giving this book a second life, and to my wonderful agent, Valerie Borchardt, for taking care of business so I don’t have to.

I read a number of books to supplement my research for this novel. Particularly informative were Dai Qing’s
The River Dragon Has Come!: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People
, Peter Hessler’s
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
, and Jan Wong’s
Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now
.

And of course, thanks to Kevin, whose fingerprints are on every page.

THE STORY BEHIND
Dream of the Blue Room

Dream of the Blue Room
began with a classified ad in
The New York Times
. The year was 1997, and I was living on New York’s Upper West Side. I had just quit my cubicle job at a major public relations firm. Desperate for a paycheck, I answered an ad for an English tutor, and a couple of days later I was being interviewed in a posh apartment in midtown by the president of a Chinese trading company who went by the name of Tony. We sealed the deal on the spot. As I understood it, my job would involve light administrative duties, along with accompanying Tony to restaurants, farmers’ markets, art galleries, design stores—anywhere that he could learn new vocabulary.

My first day on the job, I assembled a vacuum cleaner in Tony’s apartment. My task: to decode the instructions. Three hours after we began, we stood admiring the partially functioning vacuum cleaner. That’s when Tony hit me with the news: “I go to China next Monday. You go Wednesday.”

“China?” I said, trying to hide my shock. “How long?”

“Maybe two months. Maybe three months,” he said.

I’d been under the impression that I would be working in the company’s offices in the Empire State Building. Whatever Tony might have said about the impending trip to China during our interview had apparently been lost in translation.

That weekend I bought a travel guide, a phrase book, a refurbished laptop, and a comfortable pair of sandals. Two weeks after answering the ad, I was on a plane to Beijing, the computer stashed under the seat in front of me. If I was going to spend three months in China, I figured I might as well make a book out of it. I decided my book would be a memoir—something about a girl from Alabama who goes to China by way of New York and discovers—what? I hadn’t planned that far ahead.

When I arrived in Beijing, I was met by a black Mercedes with tinted windows. As the driver swerved wildly through crowded streets teeming with bicycles, Tony and I sat awkwardly and silently in the backseat, the fledgling familiarity we had established during our week together in New York having entirely evaporated. An hour later, the car pulled up to a towering apartment building across the street from a shopping mall. Tony accompanied me to the penthouse, where he showed me how to work the TV, the stereo, and the karaoke machine, and promised to return the next day. After he left, I went scavenging in the kitchen. The only thing in the refrigerator was a spoiled carton of soy milk. I didn’t have a single yuan to my name. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese. I was hungry and had already eaten all my granola bars on the plane.

A couple of hours later, as I tried unsuccessfully for the umpteenth time to place a phone call to my boyfriend back in New York, there was a knock at the door. It was a teenaged boy, very shy, bearing a few bottles of water and a small wad of colorful paper money. I tried to ask him when Tony was coming back and where I might buy food, but he just nodded, said “Thank you,” and left. I took out my laptop, thinking that if I couldn’t call home or feed my growling stomach, at least I could write. But the battery was dead, and my charger didn’t fit into the electrical outlets. So I did what people used to do, long ago, in the dark age of letters: I took out a pen and a sheet of paper. Thus began my adventures in China.

As it turned out, Tony had very little time to be tutored. He would frequently call on a Tuesday to tell me that he would be traveling until Friday, and I could use the time as I pleased. The freedom suited me. I spent my days walking around the city, eating at roadside stalls, shopping in the flea market behind Tiananmen Square, wandering down ancient streets crowded with centuries-old hutongs. When I needed a break from the constant noise and crowds of the capital, I’d take a taxi to the Forbidden City and find an empty corner within the majestic walls to read. One of the books I read in China was
Dream of the Red Chamber
, the classic seventeenth-century novel by Tsao Hsueh-Chin. Eventually, I would turn to Hsueh-Chin as the inspiration for the title of my first novel.

I also took several trips outside the city. One of the most interesting was to Xi’an, where I saw the legendary terra-cotta warriors. On the bus ride into Xi’an from the airport, I met a Chinese geologist who was surprisingly candid about the Three Gorges Dam, the construction of which was then underway. I had been doing some reading about the dam, so I knew the basic facts. Millions of people who lived along the Yangtze would be forced to evacuate their homes to make way for the dam’s reservoir, which would be the largest manmade lake in the world. Hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts would be destroyed. Thousands of towns and cities would be inundated. According to the geologist, the dam was a disaster waiting to happen; he was certain it would eventually result in catastrophic flooding. Although there was a great deal of antidam sentiment, it wasn’t a subject many were willing to talk about. Despite recent nods to a more open society, speaking out against the communist government was still a very dangerous thing to do in China.

I found myself writing a lot about the dam during those months, as well as about the people I met during my travels. Upon returning home, however, I realized that my heart wasn’t in the memoir. There was another story I wanted to tell, and it wasn’t about myself. The story I wanted to tell was about Amanda Ruth, an eighteen-year-old Chinese American girl who is mysteriously murdered in a small town in Alabama. As soon as the idea for the story came to me, I knew it would be told by her best friend, who journeys up the Yangtze River more than a decade later to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes near her ancestral village. I was interested in racial and sexual prejudice, in the ways we use the concept of difference and the fear of things we do not understand to define ourselves against others. I was interested in the damage this kind of thinking can do. While Amanda Ruth’s early death may make her a tragic character, she is also a courageous character; it was her courage that drew me to her. This is a young woman who defies the constraints her own closed society—living life without apology, and on her own terms.

While I was in China, I filled notebook upon notebook with observations. A good deal of the material from those notebooks made it into the novel. Several characters are influenced by people I met on my travels, especially Elvis Paris. One of the staff members at my apartment building had business cards bearing that very name, which he had chosen because Elvis Presley was his favorite singer, and his lifelong dream was to go to Paris. An Australian gentleman I met in Guilin was the inspiration for Graham. The real Graham was traveling with his wife, a handsome woman from Dalian, and the two of them provided excellent company on a brief cruise down the Li River.

But the most vivid character, in my mind, is probably the landscape itself, which made such an unforgettable impression on me. To me, this ancient nation in flux seemed like the ideal backdrop for the story of a woman who is traveling back into her own past.

Dream of the Blue Room
was my first book-length foray into the subject of memory. A massive inundation of water, one of nature’s most powerful forces, threatens to destroy a nation’s collective memory. Since the writing of this novel, the dam has come almost to completion. The Three Gorges as they appear in this book no longer exist. Many of the towns mentioned here are now buried beneath a massive, stagnant lake, their inhabitants eking out an existence far away from the homes where their families lived for generations. The dam threatens the loss of memory on a massive scale. But it may also be the starting point of a new kind of oral history. When the physical things that define us are gone, what are we left with but story? Stories, after all, do not live in things. They live in the words we pass down from one generation to the next.

Years later, in
The Year of Fog
, I would return to the theme of memory—its complexities, its power to restore. In
No One You Know
, I would tackle the idea of story—how narratives, both true and false, define the lives of individuals and of families, and how one woman must rewrite her own narrative twenty years after her sister’s death. Three novels and one short story collection into my life as a writer, I understand something I could not have imagined when I first stepped foot in Beijing twelve years ago: that certain themes would haunt me, would grow and converge over time, and that the big questions about life and the world we live in which perplexed me in my late twenties would follow me into my late thirties, and beyond.

I keep coming back to a line in Lars Gustafsson’s beautiful book,
The Death of a Beekeeper:
“We begin again. We never give up.” For me, each novel is a process of beginning again. But each one, in some way, traces back to the beginning, to the first stories I attempted to tell. It is possible that in
Dream of the Blue Room
, my first novel, one can find the seeds of the books I have written since then, and the ones I have yet to write.