“Good luck,” she said.
On the plane she saw him sitting some rows ahead of her with his friends. They were full of swagger, laughing, enjoying one another.
She slept for a while. When she awoke it was to the sound of the muddy intercom system, the voice speaking Chinese through waves of static. She tuned in to it. They’d be late in landing, and something about the situation on the ground in Beijing.
Now she was awake. Situation?
“What situation?” she asked the man sitting next to her.
“Bu da qingqu,” he said, I’m not clear. He had been sleeping too, his mouth open, his head collapsed on his shiny pinstriped shoulder, and had just jerked back to consciousness. He rearranged himself with a series of small, staccato throat-clearings and fumbled in his briefcase.
The ah chan Bai turned from the front of the plane and met her eyes with his, a simple nod of acknowledgment. She nodded back. He probably didn’t know anything either.
The plane landed and taxied normally but then stopped a few hundred yards from the terminal. First fifteen minutes, then a half hour, then forty-five minutes, everyone nervous and shifting in their seats. She could feel the fear. These days, anything during air travel that carried even the hint of strangeness plunged people into trembling alarm. Lia listened, eavesdropping on the Mandarin around her, and realized that no one knew what was going on. Whatever it was, it had happened after they left Jingdezhen.
Finally the engines roared up again and they rolled to the gate. Lia spilled out into a cavernous hall with the others, pouring through the crowd, hurrying over the mirror-polished faux-stone floors. All around she heard a rolling, burry wash of Mandarin spotted with pockets of English and other foreign languages, everything bouncing off the gleaming surfaces up to the high metal rafters above. Why were there so many people? In the press of faces she read agitation, fear, anger. She wished she didn’t have to hear. She wanted to take her hearing aids out. It was too much.
To the right she saw the sign EXIT AND BAGGAGE CLAIM. When they passed through the security doors they hit an even bigger crowd. The massive hall where people customarily came to meet arrivals was jammed with Chinese. She threaded through them in a thin line of exiting passengers, ducked through the doors, and ran outside.
Taxis were in a snarl. She picked one outside the hive and circled to it. A head taller than everyone else, obstinately Caucasian, she cut through the traffic at a sprint. The driver was too surprised to say no when she yanked open the door to his cab.
“Qu nar?” he said to her, Where are you going?
“Jiaodaokou Nan, Gulou Dong, neige lukou,” she said, Corner of Jiaodaokou South and Gulou East. He pulled out. They came to the airport exit, he paid the toll, and she waited until they were flying along the Jichang Expressway to speak again. “What is it, this thing that’s happened?” she said. “What’s going on?”
He looked at her in the mirror.
“At the airport.”
His eyes went back to the road. “A flight coming to Beijing crashed.”
“Oh. But that’s terrible.” She sat back like she’d been pushed. Phillip, she thought. Phillip had been bound for Beijing. “What airline?” she said.
“China International.”
“Oh. Awful.” To herself she was thinking: China International. A Mainland company. Phillip would never take a Mainland airline unless his flight had been canceled and he had no other options. However. Such things happened. She would call the office right away. “Did it crash on landing?” she asked, because she had seen no indications at the airport, no lights, no blinking chaos of emergency. Just all those people.
“No. It exploded over the ocean.”
“Oh. That’s very bad,” she said quietly, fearing the worst kind of scenario. “What happened?”
“Do I know? How can I know? No one says yet.” He pointed to the radio. “But some boats in the area saw a light streaking up. So people are already saying it was shot down.”
“Shot down?” She leaned forward in her seat, trying to tick through the possibilities in her mind. Which terrorist organization? A domestic insurgent group? “Who would have shot it down?”
“The U.S., is what people say.”
“The U.S.!” That is not remotely possible, she thought. How could it be in the interests of the U.S. to shoot down a passenger jet? Not the U.S. Not deliberately. She was sure of it. She looked up at the man behind the little Plexiglas partition so many of the taxi drivers used in hopes it would protect them from assault and theft. She could tell by the narrowing of his eyes and the tight look he threw into the mirror that he didn’t agree.
Well, she thought, he wouldn’t; there were deeper tides at work. Whenever U.S.-China relations got rough, the well of China’s nationalistic resentment seemed to open up again. It was always there. And even though there were times when the government encouraged such sentiment for its own reasons, the sentiment itself was real, a true net of memory under everything, memories of slights and wars and victimization by foreign governments-despite the manifest greatness of the civilization. Despite that. So galling. Yes, and wasn’t this one of the very things she had always so loved about this place: that historical memory was so long, so widely held. It was one of the ways art and culture had endured. Yes. And here was memory’s flip side, the chronic remembrance of guochi, national humiliation. “Whatever happened, it’s terrible,” she said.
He was looking at her in the mirror. “Are you American?”
“No,” she said.
“What then?”
“Me?” She bristled, covered it. “Xin Xi Lan ren.” New Zealander.
“Ei.”
“It’s a tragedy.”
“Jiu shi le ma,” he answered, Isn’t that so.
Talking to him had become uncomfortable and she leaned against the window, staring out at the walls and overpasses and buildings, the construction sites. Probably the crash was an accident. The Chinese government would investigate and they would find out and they would make an announcement saying so. At least that was what she hoped. She looked back at the line of the driver’s jaw, the hardness in his eyes.
It had better happen soon, because Phillip was on his way and they had to finish. Phillip. Her mind went back to its whirling. Phillip would never fly China International. Would he? Ten to one he was waiting at the guesthouse.
The driver took her to the mouth of Houyuan'ensi Hutong. She got out there and paid him, walked quickly away from the roaring boulevard and down the lane to the guesthouse.
She stopped at the front desk. “Phillip Gambrill from the U.S.? Has he checked in?”
The clerk’s expression told her he had not. “Would you look?” Lia said, and the woman flipped through the register and confirmed it: No, he had not arrived.
So Lia went to her room, put down her things, and called. She got Zheng’s voice mail. She listened to his beautifully modulated recorded greeting and then, when she heard the beep, experienced a moment of panic because she was afraid even to articulate what it was that she so feared. “Hi, just calling to double-check what airline Phillip was on and when he is due to arrive. I’m back in Beijing. Call me.”
She hung up and sat for a moment, just long enough to catch her breath. It didn’t matter when he was going to arrive, she couldn’t wait. She had to go to the pots. She still had a few good hours left.
She took a taxi along the willow-lined edge of Houhai Lake to the compound. The taxi driver was listening to the radio, a talk show on which people were pouring out feelings about the plane crash. People sounded wounded and resentful. “Aggressive acts by foreign countries should be opposed,” one man said. “China should not permit this. We should take a firm stand.”