"Talk."
"Yes." He gazed openly. "Talk."
She felt her mouth part into a smile. She felt powerful, she felt like Mu-lan. Hadn’t Dr. Lin compared her to Mu-lan? Lin Shiyang. Thinking about him brought a wave of happiness. A tiny breeze eddied the ashes at her feet. "May your road be level and peaceful," she said to the man, turned, and walked away.
Dr. Lin Shiyang left his room, where he had claimed to be suffering from fever, and where he had stayed until the others left in the jeep, and walked out of the Number One and around the corner to the bicycle rental. The old man looked up at him pleasantly. "The gentleman will ride today?"
Lin nodded.
"I kept this one for you specially," the old man lied, presenting a wreck of a wine-red three-speed. "Three people tried to rent it this morning. But I felt you might come."
"Old uncle"-Lin smiled knowingly-"you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble."
"It was nothing-for you." The man swiftly pocketed the five-yuan rental fee. Five yuan! A scholar from the eastern cities-rich, obviously, money flying from his fingers.
"I thank you," Lin said formally, and took the bike. Poor old uncle, he should have been dozing in some teahouse and here he was scratching a living in small change. "May I depend on your discretion?" he asked the old man carefully, and handed him another one-yuan note.
The man took the note, shrugged, and looked away. "I never remember anyone."
Lin walked the bike away from the stall and carefully swung one leg over the seat. He steered onto Sun Yat-sen, turned left, and pedaled toward the drum tower. That was where the West Road began. Over the past week, from time to time, he had asked directions to the outlying villages of people chosen at random along the street. Never too much of any one person. He didn’t want anyone remembering him. This was an art many Chinese of his generation had perfected: absorbing as much as possible, while escaping the notice of others entirely.
And the Americans, how much did they notice? It was an interesting question to him, one he had pondered at some length. The main thing about the two Americans was the way they constantly emanated. Talking, exclaiming, explaining. Especially explaining. They seemed obsessed with making themselves understood. On the other hand they seemed to take in rather little.
Of course, until now he had never actually had dealings with an American. They were what he’d expected, although Spencer and Mo Ai-li were different from each other, maddeningly individual. This in itself he found confusing. In his own world each one had his thoughts and dreams, his private life- but in a group endeavor, especially one which involved outsiders, this would be concealed in favor of a united front. Factions and disagreements hidden. Truths evaded.
He would never do what the woman interpreter had done that night they had met in the courtyard, for instance-ask him straight out if he wished his life had been different. Remarkable! And yet this forthrightness was what excited him. She kept saying outrageous things-first about the Chaos, then about his wife being sentenced to the laogai, and then asking him rudely whether he had put aside his wife and taken someone else. Surely she had some idea how shattering it was when a man was forced to denounce his mate on government orders. Yet that night she had baldly demanded to know if he had done this, as if she was asking no more than what he had eaten at his last meal. Each time she had come at him this way, he had been momentarily numbed by disbelief, then pinpricked by excitement. Mental. And yes, sexual. Even though he was forty-six years old and the women he met who stirred him this way now were few. He shook his head slowly. The drum tower. Left turn.
Perhaps she will be my wound story, he thought. He’d had a peculiar aversion to Wound Literature, though this popular fiction movement of the late seventies and eighties had captivated many of his friends and colleagues. They had eagerly devoured every unbearably sad novel and short story collection that came along, each man reliving his own Cultural Revolution tragedy in the reading. Lin hadn’t been able to do so. To open these books, read them, and close them again would be to put Meiyan behind him. And he preferred to hold on to her.
Even though he knew-a part of him knew-that this was wrong. It prevented him from loving again. His closest friends, even his mother, who had adored Meiyan and longed for the grandchild he and Meiyan never gave her, had advised him, finally, to stop. "You are bottled up in the past like a turtle in a jar, my son. The years are passing: the sun and moon fly back and forth. Don’t continue on this way."
"But there’s always a chance, isn’t there? Some people return from the laogai. Like Little Yan’s uncle. Remember? The family had given him up for lost? And then they found him again, his teeth gone, his health ruined, but alive, he was alive…"
But that had been years ago. He knew of no one who had been gone as long as Meiyan had been gone, gone without letters or messages, and come back.
And now a surprise, Mo Ai-li, Little Mo-not so little, clearly a woman past thirty who should have been married long since. There was no doubt he felt drawn to her. And she seemed to feel the same way. At least she prodded him with her questions, stared at him when she thought he didn’t see, even sat next to him in the vehicle and at meals. None of this had escaped Kong’s notice. Kong had even joked to him one day that he must let him know whether Western women were really different, as was said. "Bie shuo-le," Lin had replied curtly, Don’t talk like that, but his answer only made Kong laugh and he regretted, later, having responded at all.
Yet she was different. She didn’t retreat, didn’t defer, didn’t laugh behind her hand like a Chinese woman-in spite of her reasonable grasp of the language and her constant, often ridiculous attempts to follow Chinese manners. Despite all that she spoke to him with a bold intelligence. She might, he thought, be a woman with whom he could talk of the many things he considered in private: linguistics twisting back three thousand years to the scapulimancy of the Shang dynasty; the magical jumble of stories and legends that remained from the dawn of Chinese history; the faint picture-which he often reviewed in his mind-of Homo erectus roaming this land half a million years ago. Then north China had been fertile, wet, a green jungle, not the arid ocean of alluvial silt it was today. There Sinanthropus had not made his own shelter, but had taken refuge where he could, in caves and under outcroppings and in groves by the side of the river…
It had been Meiyan’s field, too, Homo erectus. He pedaled harder, thinking of the afternoon they got married in Gao Yeh’s room in Zhengzhou. They had got the go-ahead from the danwei, months after requesting permission from the university Party boss to "talk about love." It had been winter. The other students crowded in, padded blue jackets and stuffed-up trouser legs jostling for space. Gao Yeh shouting, drunk, how lovely their life together was going to be, and singing the children’s song:
As the sun rose over the mountain
A student came riding along.
He sat on a dapple-gray pony
And sang a scrap of song.
To the home of his bride he was going
And he hoped that she wouldn’t be out.
He saw as he pushed the door open
The girl he was thinking about.
Her cheeks were as pink as a rosebud.
Her teeth were as white as a pearl.
Her lips were as red as a cherry.