"Really? I hardly know whether to believe you or not. Still, you are the first foreigner I’ve ever spoken with, so"-for the first time he allowed a hint of a smile onto his composed face-"my research is not complete."
"Not yet."
"Not yet," she heard him answer, but she couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or merely echoing, the way Chinese often did. "You’ve really never met another foreigner?"
"Oh, yes, I have met other foreigners. I’m originally from Shanghai, you know. I moved to Zhengzhou as an adult."
"Yes, I hear that in your accent," Alice said, for he had the s-laden pronunciation of someone from the Yangtze River delta.
"As a child in Shanghai, I sometimes met foreigners. But you are the first one I’ve met who can talk." And the first one, he thought, who seems aware and civilized. He studied her peculiar skin, pale but covered with freckles, and her sharp but not entirely unpleasant nose. He was careful not to look directly at her body. Peripherally he registered it, though: spare and compact, wider across the shoulders than a Chinese woman, but narrower through the hips and legs. How strange, he thought, the way Western women wear clothes that show every curve and line of their bodies, leaving nothing for a man to imagine…
"Then I’m honored to meet you," she was saying.
Dr. Kong had stabbed out a number on his phone and was talking rapidly to someone in a slurred, provincial accent. Dr. Lin stood for a minute, nodding politely to her and to Spencer, and finally fitted himself onto the berth opposite Alice. He lay on his side, head propped on his hand, and kept his serious gaze on her. "If you permit me to ask, Interpreter Mo. How does an outside woman come to learn Chinese? Your parents were perhaps missionaries?"
She laughed. "No-far from it."
"Your father is a diplomat, then?"
"My father is a United States congressman," she said, and instantly regretted it.
"A congressman," he repeated.
She sighed. This would be repugnant to him. In China, everyone scorned the bratty children of the ruling elite. Why had she told him?
"A difficult road," he answered.
"Shi zheiyangde." That’s how it is.
Professor Lin’s eyes lit on the book she still clasped in her hand. "Ni kan shenmo?" What are you reading?
"The letters of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin." She showed him the book. "Do you read English?"
"No. Eh, the French priest." He turned the book over, regarding Teilhard’s solemn picture on the back cover, the spiritual blue eyes, the black-and-white priest’s collar. "So Teilhard is famous in the West for his discoveries."
"Not at all. Hardly known for that. Famous for books he wrote about religion."
"Religion?" He stared at her.
"His church"-she had to search a moment for the word for Catholics – "the tianzhujiao didn’t accept evolution. Teilhard wrote books describing evolution itself as an act of God. Reconciling science and religion. These books are quite famous."
"I see," he said. "But is it not strange to have to prove these things? Because man has evolved since the ancient times. That is the fact."
"Now this is known," Alice agreed. "But in the time of the French priest, a lot of Western people still believed in their old creation myth-that the world began with a man and woman in Paradise, and they sinned, and because of that the world is tainted and none of us is pure."
"Oh, yes, I have heard this religious idea from the West." He narrowed his eyes. "Do you believe it?"
"Of course not." She grinned. "Who of intelligence believes such a thing? The world did not suddenly appear four or five thousand years ago. So much in archaeology goes back so much farther! It seems like every year they find something older-isn’t it so? Homo sapiens has been here a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand years. And before that- Homo erectus." Her eyes were bright with interest.
He smiled. "I’d always heard Western people had no interest in the past."
"Not me, Dr. Lin. I love history. I love everything old."
"Me too," he said softly.
Then suddenly Spencer was there, speaking, pointing outside to the heat-shimmering rocky tundra. "Tell him it looks just like Nevada."
She translated this.
Lin drew his brows together.
"Did you tell him I’m from Reno?" Spencer asked. "It’s amazing how much it looks like home. The geology and topography-I could be in Nevada!"
Alice put this in Chinese.
"Come on," Spencer said. "What were you and Dr. Lin talking about?"
"Oh. Chinese-Western attitudes on evolution."
"Okay. He got the briefing. He knows what we want, the intact teeth, the DNA sample, to find out who modern humans are descended from. So ask him. Ask him if he believes Homoerectus came from Africa or evolved in China."
"Dr. Lin. Dr. Spencer wonders if you think Peking Man evolved separately here in China, or if Homo erectus evolved everywhere out of Africa."
Lin opened his small black eyes wide. "Separately in China. Naturally. This is well known."
She conveyed this to Spencer.
"What?" the American pressed. "How is it known?"
Lin lifted his big shoulders in a shrug. "It is borne out by the fossils-Acheulean tools are found with Homo erectus in Africa and Europe, but never in China. Asian Homo erectus must be a separate species. Of course, this is logical. China is the seat of civilization. It’s the place where all ancient life took hold. Also, it hardly seems possible that modern Chinese could be descended from Africans. The races are too-too different."
Dr. Spencer opened his mouth, then closed it again. He gave Alice a look that said: Aren’t they silly. She could tell Dr. Lin, eyes crinkling with humor as he leafed through the book of Teilhard’s letters, was thinking the same thing about them.
Late that night, just before she slipped into the deep, disassociated well of sleep, a shaft of light crossed the car and she caught a glimpse of Dr. Lin’s face in the opposite berth. His eyes were open and he was watching her.
The lush oasis fringe around Yinchuan appeared as a sudden block of emerald, backed right up to the rocky brown desert. One moment there were mountains bare as flesh undulating to the horizon, the next the train was flashing through grove after grove of oleaster trees, their leaves rustling green and silver in the wind. Canal trenches jumped out of the Yellow River, itself a muddy silt ribbon in the distance, and sprinted in all directions. They vanished into fields of eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. And miles of rice: the seductive carpet of deep green so rarely seen in north China.
In 1923, she knew, the rail line had ended at Baotou- where Lin and Kong had boarded the train. There Teilhard and his fellow priest, Émile Licent, had paid silver Mex dollars for mules, and ridden across the desert to this city, Yinchuan. The name Yinchuan was incomprehensible to Alice. Yinchuan meant Silver River, and nowhere was the river anything but a slow, plodding brown. She noticed as the train clattered through town that the city walls Teilhard had mentioned in his letters were gone. Instead there was a string of masonry buildings, and the billowing smokestacks of factories. Here and there Alice could see a few of the original gates and watchtowers, still standing up, shocked and ancient.
They fell exhausted into the lobby of the Number One Guesthouse, spilling on the limestone floor with their bags and their gear and their dust-streaked clothes. They were given their rooms: Alice and Adam in one building, Kong and Lin in another.
"Why?" Adam wanted to know.
It was the way it always was, she explained: Chinese and foreigners separated.