"Stop it!" She was crying now. "It’s wrong for you to do this. You can’t force me!"
"Force you?" He looked at her hard, fully in control. "Of course I wouldn’t force you. I would never force you."
"But you-"
"Oh, no, sweetheart. I had to say what I’ve said, but you are a grown woman. You’ll have to choose for yourself. Here. When I got your letter I took all these out of the safe deposit." He removed a folder from his briefcase and reached into it.
Her eyes grew wide.
As she watched he slapped down her birth certificate, photos of herself as a child, alone, with Horace, as a baby with her mother.
"Take these, if you marry him. Leave this Mannegan family, this family of you and me. You want to be Chinese? Go ahead. Be Chinese. But you won’t be my daughter any longer."
She still remembered how, without anger now, without sharpness, but with infinite sadness and his eyes still brimming, he had clicked the briefcase shut, risen, and walked from the restaurant. As if it were not some personal, vengeful choice of his own but inescapable natural forces which drove him to do what he did.
Now, standing in the doorway of the Meng apartment, she suddenly remembered what she was holding. She thrust the grease-spotted, paper-wrapped ham into the Chinese man’s arms. "Jian," her voice came cracking out, "if I could say how sorry I-"
"Zenmole?" What is it? sang a pleasant female voice from the cooking area at the rear of the apartment. A woman in her twenties with a plump, tight-porcelain face sauntered out, baby riding her hip. Alice stared, feeling something die inside her. She knew about Jian’s wife, of course she knew, but she hadn’t seen Jian face to face since his marriage and she’d never seen the bride. Now here she was. With their baby. "Shui-a?" the young woman asked, glancing to Mother Meng, Who is this?
"A family friend," the old lady murmured.
"Jian?" the wife asked.
"Shi, " he clipped. It’s so.
Alice saw the young woman look openly at her, innocent of their whole situation. There must be a million things about him you don’t know, Alice thought in a brief, violent burst of satisfaction.
"Ta jiu yao likai-le," Jian added crossly, She’s about to leave.
Alice threw a desperate glance to Meng Shaowen. Mother Meng? she begged with her eyes. Must I go?
Mrs. Meng nodded once, a bowing of grass in front of wind. Jian was married to someone else now. Alice did not belong.
Jian stepped close to Alice. "Alice." He spoke in English, English she’d taught him during their year together. "You should not have come here. There’s no more to say about what happened. I understand now. You could not commit to me."
"Neither could you, to me."
"Shenmo?" What?
"It wasn’t all me. It was you too. Wasn’t it? You didn’t love me quan xin, quan yi. If you had you would have said: Forget your father. Marry me anyway. And I would have. But you didn’t."
He tightened his mouth, unwilling to respond.
I knew it, she thought, and the hurt blazed over her. Hurt and all its ripples of revelation. "Jian. You couldn’t bring your true self to me any more than I could bring mine to you."
"Naturally. You’re American. You’re white."
"Oh, come on, Jian-"
"Guoqu-de shi jiu rang ta guoqu-ba, " he retorted, reverting to Chinese. Let the past go.
She felt her cheeks reddening.
"Jian?" the wife queried.
"Anyway," he went on, ignoring his wife. "I have responsibilities to my ancestors. Now"-he motioned with his eyes to his Chinese baby, in his wife’s arms-"wo zuodao-le." He evaluated her one final time, as if to commit her to memory.
In some basal pit of herself Alice wanted to reach for him. She sensed he felt it too. If it were not for the tangle of the present day all around them, if what was inside them could have been free, they might have crumpled into each other’s arms. As it was he shook his head and spoke to her softly, sternly, in English: "Now don’t ever come here again."
Gently, he shut the door.
She lay in bed the next morning. The rush-hour mob of bicycles and cars and trucks on Changan subsided from a roar to a rumble. Spencer came to her door once, knocked. She couldn’t deal with him then; just couldn’t rise to it. She called out for him to come back later.
Seeing Jian again. Thinking about what she’d had with him, about almost being able to connect with her true heart. Lucile had found another self with Pierre, a self higher than man-woman love. Had she fulfilled her true heart? The worstfailing of our minds is that we fail to see the really big problemssimply because the forms in which they arise are right under oureyes.
And Adam Spencer was right. She was stalled. Years now she’d been working as a low-level translator when she should have been so much more-a scholar, a sinologist, an intelligent woman taking the four treasures-the brush, the ink, the inkstone, the paper-and turning them into a lifetime of insight and erudition.
She heard a movement outside the door. It was Spencer again. "Alice! I have to buy the train tickets. Are you coming with me or not?"
"Wait a minute!" She limped into the bathroom, threw cold water on her face. Examined herself, the water running from her cheekbones. Not young any longer. The years were starting to pull her face downward, she could already see where the lines and the sags were starting to form.
Thirty-six, she thought, touching her cheek. But I’m smart, really smart, and I have heart. I could love again. If I could only get the chance.
"Alice?" Spencer’s voice was muffled by the door.
She toweled off. With the canyons of scratchy cotton cloth pressed against her face she suddenly pictured the man she had met in the vice director’s office the day before. Dr. Lin. The man who had seemed to take in everything, and who had held her name card for such a long time, so attentively. She locked eyes with herself in the mirror. The forms in which they arise areright under our eyes.
"Alice."
She walked out of the bathroom. "All right! Dr. Spencer? Can you hear me? I’ll come with you."
5
The train stood gasping in Beijing Zhan. They pushed aboard with the Chinese and all their boxes, suitcases, bundles, and bags full of fruit, melon seeds, and steaming, fragrant baozi.
She glanced around the second-class hard sleeper. It would be a rough two days and nights, sleeping on flat, narrow berths stacked three up to the ceiling. Though it was better than sitting up all night on a wooden bench, in "hard seat."
"Berth forty-three," he said, handing her a stub.
A middle bunk, just above his. A couple of slots facing them on the right, empty. Those were for their Chinese colleagues, Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin, who were scheduled to board at Baotou.
"Where’s your luggage?"
"This is it." She tossed the black Rollaboard on her berth. Her point of honor: never more than one carry-on bag, plus a purse. And of course, she had to make it smaller than regulation size, which then catapulted her into an agonized stratosphere of wardrobe planning. Pants, shirts, and socks that all matched, all the colors and weights and textures in line and interchangeable. One baseball cap, weighing nothing. Tiny vials of shampoo and cleanser and moisturizer and makeup and toothpaste, all rationed out day by day. The collapsing hair-brush, the minitoothbrush. The clothes with labels snipped out. Her one concession: the black dress, for going out. The antique Chinese stomach-protector.
"That’s really all you have?"
"All I need."
"You’re incredible."
"I notice you don’t carry too much either. You always wear the same thing."
He laughed. "That’s lifestyle engineering. Just think of the hours I’ve saved in my life wearing only jeans and work shirts. Days, by now. Weeks."