AFTER THAT IT’S TIME for dinner. Too much food, which happens just about anytime a Chinese person invites you to his home and which always embarrasses me. Dried noodles with meat and spices, chicken in bean sauce and ginger, fried rice cakes with shrimp, pumpkin stuffed with sweet taro, and a lot of vegetables. Wa Keung must have picked some of this up while I was at the doctor’s; they couldn’t have made it all so quickly.
“Really good,” I say, and it is.
“We grow a lot ourselves,” Mei Yee says. “The rice and the vegetables. We also have chickens and a few pigs.”
Wa Keung shakes his head. “But crops don’t grow the way they used to. In the southern fields, many things die or don’t grow right. We had eggplant last year, and most of them were shaped strangely. Couldn’t sell them. Afraid to eat them.”
“What do you think causes it?” I ask, although of course I already know the answer.
Wa Keung snorts and laughs. “The workshops, of course. The pollution. They were supposed to clean it up in Guiyu, but all they’ve done is move it to other places, closer to us.”
“People get sick now, all the time,” Mei Yee chimes in. “Everyone knows someone with cancer. Everyone.”
Great, I think, looking at the delicious food on my plate. Who the fuck knows what’s in this stuff, how safe any of it is?
I eat it anyway. You know, to be polite.
WA KEUNG POURS A round of baijiu, for everyone but Moudzu. Clear grain alcohol, ranging from pretty smooth to furniture-stripping, depending on how much you spend.
“Drink, drink,” he says, noticing my hesitation. “A little bit is good for you. Anyway, you cannot drink the water here.” He waves at the dispenser by the refrigerator. “We have to spend money on water from out of town.”
I sip. The stuff burns my throat.
“We’ve had enough,” he says. “The guy, the one who hit you, his bosses-they take people’s land. Beat people. Poison our crops. Get rich and give us nothing. That farmer, the one who bombed the government offices in Fujian, he had the right idea.”
He pours himself another shot of baijiu and tosses it back.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can see why you’re angry.”
“So you’re a reporter?” he asks. “An environmentalist?” I shake my head, reluctantly.
The disappointment shows on both his and Mei Yee’s faces, though they quickly cover it up with smiles.
I had a feeling, you know? That they didn’t just rescue me and take me to the doctor and stuff me full of food and have their kid fix my computer because they’re nice people, though they seem nice enough. They’re looking for justice, for someone to pay attention to their problems, for things to be put right. I don’t know how much news coverage even does for situations like this, but sometimes, if the central government’s sufficiently embarrassed, sometimes the problem gets addressed.
And then moved somewhere else, out of sight.
“Why you come here, then?” Mei Yee asks flatly.
“Looking for the brother of a friend,” I say. I tell them the story and pull out my photo of Jason.
They haven’t seen him.
“Environmentalists come all the time to Guiyu,” Mei Yee says. “Not so much out here.”
“I understand,” I say. We sit in silence. Wa Keung drinks more baijiu. I have another glass of beer.
Then it occurs to me: These guys are farmers. They grow things. Like, from seeds.
“Ni zhidao Xin Shiji Zhongzi Gongsi?” I ask. Have you heard of New Century Seeds?
Wa Keung frowns. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, we just plant some.”
I TELL WA KEUNG I can walk, and I follow him outside with the aid of my crutch-between the Percocet and the beer, I’m feeling pretty good.
We go out behind the house, and Wa Keung points to a paddy cut into the hill that I can just make out, water glinting under the moonlight.
“Rice,” he says. “First time I try this kind. Sprouting now. Seems good enough.”
“So it’s just normal rice?” I ask.
“No, they say it’s special kind. They tell us in conditions like this it grows better than normal rice.”
“Conditions like what?”
He turns his palms skyward and spreads his arms. “Like all of this. The pollution. The bad air and dirty water and poisoned earth. They say the rice will still grow, no matter what.”
Prickles rise on the back of my neck. I’m not even sure why. I mean, rice that can grow in bad soil, that’s a good thing, right?
“No matter what? How can it do that?”
“Not sure. They say it’s ‘scientific process of development.’ ” Wa Keung shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’d rather grow same rice we grow here for generations. But last year’s crop hardly worth growing. Old rice can’t live here anymore.”
There’s something buzzing in my head, about Jason, about him being into the environment, about a seed company in the middle of a toxic-waste dump.
Jason may be off his meds, but something’s not right here.
“Do you think this new rice is safe?” I ask. “My meaning is… if it can grow in these conditions…”
Do you really want to be eating something that can grow in poisoned ground?
He shrugs. “Who can say? Nothing is safe here. But we still have to make money. We have to eat. What choice do we have?”
Wa Keung drives me in the tuolaji to a bus stop in the town where I saw the doctor, where I can catch a bus back to Shantou. He and Mei Yee made the polite offer that I should stay at their place for the night; I just as politely turned it down. I’m not the person they hoped I was, and they’ve already done enough for me. Besides, I want to get back to Shantou, to my hotel, to my own room and my own bed, temporary as it all is.
Before I go, Wa Keung tells me a little more about the New Century “Hero Rice” seeds.
“They say you can’t save seeds and grow from them the next year,” he tells me. “That you need to buy the seeds each time.”
“That sounds a little complicated,” I say.
“Maybe it’s not true. Maybe that’s just what they want you to think, so they can make more money.” He grins, and for the first time I can see that he’s Moudzu’s father.
“Rice is rice,” he tells me. “If it isn’t processed, you can grow it. Of course we’ll try to use what we grow. Why should we pay them over and over again?”
We go into a little shed tacked onto the main house, stuffed with random junk-a broken chair, a stack of empty plastic buckets, a battered suitcase-and he aims a flashlight to show me the bag the rice came in, which they’d been using to store some of Moudzu’s computer parts. It’s a couple feet high, white woven plastic with a red, gold, and black stencil on it of your basic Chinese proletariat hero thrusting a hoe into the air, rice growing triumphantly in the background. NEW CENTURY HERO RICE! it says, in Chinese and English.
Is this some kind of joke?
Wa Keung dumps the components out onto the floor-a bunch of old keyboards, mostly.
“Here,” he says, folding the bag up and holding it out to me. “You can have it if you want.”
I stuff it into my daypack.
“Do you know any reporter?” he asks, “who maybe is interested in our story?”
“Maybe,” I say. I’ve met a couple anyway. “When I return to Beijing, I can ask.”
He smiles and nods, but I can’t tell if he believes me. I don’t know if I believe myself.
The other thing I do before we leave is pay Moudzu some money for the parts and trouble he took to fix my laptop. Because, what do you know, it boots up fine now.
“You should get new one,” he informs me solemnly. “This one very outdated. Most people don’t bother to fix.”