She shut herself in her room and immediately and obsessively unpacked, the way she always did upon arrival in a new hotel room. Her clothes formed neat rows in the wooden drawer, the antique silk stomach-protector and black dress hidden at the bottom. She dug from her pocket the small folded drawing of the monkey sun head and the obituary of Lucile Swan, and placed them on the bureau. Then she drew the heavy Pompeiian-red velvet curtains, filled the bathtub, stripped, and climbed in.
Ah, she thought. Light from the overhead bulb broke up on the water’s surface, clinking and distorting the pale line of her naked body underneath. She soaked until she felt clean, delivered, all true and restored again. For a time.
She closed her eyes.
She must have dozed, because when she jolted back the water had grown cold and still. She splashed to her feet, shook the drops from her hair, rubbed hard at herself with the towel.
Awake again, alive.
Tea.
Suddenly she wanted to get out, walk, see Yinchuan. Was it really different from the China she knew? So far it seemed like any backwater town, and this hotel-with its barely functional toilets and old-fashioned velvet curtains-was just another provincial establishment.
Dressed, she stepped into the hall. She saw that Spencer’s door was closed. He’d said something about reviewing Teilhard’s maps from the 1923 Shuidonggou expedition. She listened at the door, heard nothing, and went out, crossing the courtyard between the buildings, to emerge finally from the front door of the Number One complex. There Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin were sitting on the steps. "Zenmoyang?" she said politely, and sat beside them.
"I must compliment you," Kong remarked. "Your Chinese is very standard."
"Guojiang, " she demurred, and then pointed to a small black machine wrapped in its cord on the cement step. "What’s that?"
"My fax." Dr. Kong raised his narrow hands in despair. "I need a line for it, and the hotel cannot spare one. Is it not unthinkable? A hotel in this modern age without extra phone lines…" He shook his head.
"He loves that fax." Dr. Lin laughed. "He got it on a trip to Japan last year. Now he takes it everywhere."
"No extra lines. Really, I had no idea this place would be so tu."
Alice smiled. Tu, hick or rustic, carried a veiled insult. Most urban Chinese looked down on rural Chinese. "It is pretty tu out here," she conceded.
"Regrettable," sniffed Kong, and picked up the machine. "In Zhengzhou this would never happen."
"Nor in Beijing," Alice said. "But does not progress have its price? Every time I go out it seems I see some lovely old neighborhood torn down, and in its place a new concrete building."
"Yes," Kong said, "but they are beautiful. They are modern. Life in those narrow alleys in Beijing is-is"-he searched for the word-"unhygienic." He thought about his visit to the vice director’s Beijing home, just a few days before, in just such a hutong. True, his cousin’s courtyard house retained a certain feudal charm. But the smoke from the cook shed! The dogs running free! And worst of all, the primitive bathroom, no more than a tiled trough on the floor through which water gurgled. "You see, Interpreter Mo, we Chinese are most anxious to leave those primitive conditions and move into modern housing."
"Not me," she said. "I like the hutong houses better." She glanced at Dr. Lin.
"I feel the same way," Lin said, speaking to Kong but smiling at Alice. "I like the old courtyard homes."
"When they disappear a part of old China will be gone forever."
"Exactly."
Kong rolled his eyes. "The past is the past. Anyway. I’m going to the Bureau of Cultural Relics. They’ll have an extra phone line for me."
"The Bureau of Cultural Relics?" Alice asked.
"The office in charge of archaeology for all of Ningxia. They run the historical museums too." Kong hoisted his fax machine. "Zai jian."
"And what are you going to do?" Lin asked her as Kong walked out the gate.
"I thought I’d look around the town."
"I noticed a place around the corner that rents bicycles," he said carefully. "Would the foreign woman want to get a bicycle and sightsee with me?"
"Yes, I would, but if you continue to call me ’the foreign woman’ I might have to curse your ancestors for eight generations."
He laughed. " ’Interpreter Mo,’ then?"
"That’s at least a little better." She knew she could not ask him to call her ’Alice’ or ’Ai-li’; given names were only for intimate use in China. Mostly, people addressed each other by title. She didn’t mind. There was a certain security in it. One always knew where one was, in the group. Is this my group? she thought for the thousandth time. China. The Chinese.
"Better wait here," Lin advised. "I’ll go rent the bicycles. If the old man sees you are a foreigner he’ll want a huge deposit from you-a hundred yuan, say, or your passport."
"Oh." While he went around the corner she studied the old Chinese Muslim women behind their yogurt stands. They sat in their wide cotton trousers behind the rickety little tables, waving flies away from crude paper-covered crocks of yogurt. As she watched them she felt her heart pounding pleasantly. Did Lin feel the same flutter of affinity she did? Of course he does, she thought, he must. If experience had taught her anything it was that when she felt it, the other person felt it too.
Riding up Sun Yat-sen Boulevard, the main street and biggest commercial center for nearly a thousand miles of desert, Alice saw an endless stream of functional, Eastern-Bloc cement buildings. Everywhere were majestic signs in Chinese characters and Mongolian script, announcing the Number Three Light Industrial Store, the Municipal Committee for Liaison with the Minority Peoples Subheadquarters, the Hua Feng Institute for the Training of Herbal Medicine, and the Number Eight People’s Clinic.
The streets were not crowded-at least not by Beijing or Shanghai standards. They passed a few carts, an occasional car. There were no streetlights and pedestrians ambled in all random directions, hardly seeming to notice the distinction between street and sidewalk.
They paused at the West Gate Tower, which now kept only a silent, symbolic watch over the streets. She recalled one of Teilhard’s letters; he had written about standing at this West Gate of the city in 1923, looking down the long dirt road to Tibet. Tartary, he had called this place. A bygone word now. Tartary. She looked at Lin from the corner of her eye. Maybe the kind of word he would like.
"Shall we turn?" he asked.
"Sure."
They swung to the left. The road out of town was just a continuation of Serve-the-Nation Boulevard, a two-lane blacktop lined with noodle stalls and barbershops. As they pedaled west on Serve-the-Nation this crumbled into animal pens and occasional dispensaries for hardware or vegetables, and finally into farmland. They were alone. No one was following them. "Let’s stop and have a rest," Lin called over his shoulder.
They steered off the road where a small hill sloped up to a grove of willows, dropped their bikes, and sat in the grass. Off in the distance the fields marched in squares, marked off by brown-ribboned canals, punctuated here and there by the sand-colored houses made of earth. Lin pulled an orange out of his pocket and gouged at the peel with a small knife. He gazed out at the landscape and nodded as if satisfied.
"You seem to like it here."
He handed her a section, cradled in his broad palm. "You can say I have an interest in this area. I tried to get a permit to visit here in seventy-four."
"You mean you wanted to be sent here to do your work in the countryside?" She knew that educated city youth had been forcibly reassigned to rural areas then. The Cultural Revolution. She thought back. Sixty-six to seventy-six: she had been so young then, a child playing along the damp, oppressive Houston bayous, alone and jealous and full of rage at a world which seemed all wrong to her and dreaming about someplace where she would belong, really belong, and meanwhile here in China hundreds of millions of souls were flying apart. The blood in that decade drained out onto the earth faster than it could be dammed up. Later, when she came to understand the language, and began working here, she heard the stories gushing bitterly from everyone. The horror of it finally settled on her. "Why did you want to be sent here?"