"No. I’m telling you something. We are fucking now in the center of the anvil." He used the crude slang, cao, fuck.
She found this departure from his usual polite speech unimaginably exciting and struggled to pull him to her. "So this was the beginning of the world?"
He laughed and pinned her hips down so she couldn’t move. "No. The world began with Gun and his son Yu. Don’t you know this? Everybody knows this. They were gods who could change into any animal they liked. The world was covered by water then. Gun and Yu had the secret of soil-earth which could contain water and dam it up"-he pushed lightly against her-"and they used the magic soil to create land masses. Do you want it, Ai-li? Do you? Then once Gun and Yu had made the earth, they gave the earth to men."
"Please!"
"Xing, " he whispered hoarsely, okay, and drove in again. He moved inside her for a minute. "Now you tell me," he said into her ear.
"What?"
"How the world began."
"In the beginning was the word-and the word was with God-then in six days-in seven days-I don’t know, Shiyang." She couldn’t do this like he could, with words, not now, not when she felt herself rising rising rising. All she knew was, the whole of China was concentrated in him, moving with him, flowing into her. "The true Chinese man," she whispered, barely audible.
He looked down at her, his breathing ragged. He was a man, just a man, what did she mean?
But she could say no more. His rhythm had reached a perfect frequency, brought him to some ultimate spot in the center of her. The great Tengger all around them, the dark room, the bed, even his face now, just above hers, swam away into darkness.
Later they lay open, waiting for a breeze, and he said: "I really do want to know."
"What? How the world began?"
"Aiya! Shuode shi ni de wenhua!" I’m talking about your culture!
She swallowed. The hot Houston nights, the radiant, space-colony skyscrapers, the forms of upthrusting light. Country music. Men in boots and hats. The bars and juke joints. Shame of her childhood. Oh, you must be Horace Mannegan’sdaughter. "I wouldn’t know where to start."
"Start here. Where are you from?"
"I told you, Texas."
"I’m saying what country are you from? Before America."
"Oh. Different ones came from different places. Ireland, Germany, England."
He looked confused. "But what do you consider yourself?"
She hesitated. "I don’t know. The truth is, I don’t really think of myself as having a culture."
"But you are American."
"Not really."
"But of course you are American," he insisted. "And you are white. Not Chinese. That’s the way of things." But he gathered her close to him as he said this, and held her protectively, as if to console her for her whiteness, her misfortune in not being Chinese. She had the sense that he forgave her all that she was. That there was a chance that she-her true self- might be acceptable to him.
Later she closed the door to her room, took out The Phenomenonof Man, and read once again the words written by Father Teilhard more than fifty years before: Nowhere either is the need more urgent of building a bridge between the two banks of our existence-the physical and the moral… To connect the two energies, of the body and soul, in a coherent manner… Well, then. The body and soul. The self and the other. Settle down, Mother Meng said. With a strong Chinese man.
The past was locked in behind her, barbed with mistakes. She hadn’t stood up to Horace when she should have. But that was changed now. The future was up to her.
Could she do it? Could she keep house for Lin in Zhengzhou?
She thought it over. He would probably have a two-room cinder-block apartment, companionably lined with books, but cold and at the top of endless stairs and ringed by dozens of avidly nosy neighbors. Their lives would be ruled by his danwei – Zhengzhou University. A better work unit than most, maybe, but a monolithic institution nonetheless, one to which they would have to submit for every decision: when and where they might travel, what research he might undertake, what work she’d be permitted, even whether or not they might try to have a child.
Yet they’d be together. She could sleep in his arms. And every night and every morning, she could have him inside her again.
How long will that last?
Or, they could leave China.
They could live in America-but the thought seemed almost unimaginable to Alice. Whatever she was, she wasn’t American any longer.
Could Lin even live there? She envisioned him in Houston, on the hot, dewy street, along Buffalo Bayou with its cicadas swelling in summer. This was the Houston of her childhood, the one that persisted in her mind. Then there was Houston now: the chaotic commercial growth, all the nouveau business rich, the white-collar army clogging streets and freeways every morning and afternoon, the young women with their overdressed hair, the men in their discount suits. All this perhaps Shiyang could learn to accept.
But in America, who would he be? It would take him eight or ten years just to master enough English to work in his field, and by then he’d be in his mid-fifties. Too old. Ah, he would wither there. He was too much zhi shi fenzi, an intellectual.
Zhi shi fenzi. Even the Chinese phrase emphasized his otherness. It did not mean intellectual in the individual sense, but a member of the intellectual element. Like so many things in China, it was only spoken of in reference to its position in something much larger. I guess that’s a thing I’ve never had, Alice thought. A secure place in some larger mosaic.
The next day they drove back to the Mongol house in the Purabanduk Valley.
"This is the picture," Dr. Spencer said. "We know they visited Eren Obo in the winter of 1945. The Leader has records of this. And look-it is your property. They must have come here."
He handed the picture to the Mongol patriarch, Ogatai.
"I remember. It was at the end of the Japan War."
The old man handed it back. His varnished face was flattened around the cheekbones, his eyes narrowed to almost nothing. A hanging mustache and bit of beard, white. "I was young then. The French scientist came here with the woman, from Peking."
"This Frenchman-did your family know him?"
"Know him? He was like one of us!"
With his dark eyes Lin threw silent congratulations to Dr. Spencer.
"We used to live on the other side of the Helan Shan," Ogatai explained. "By the Border River. The same place where the Frenchman found the Shuidonggou site. He stayed with our family many months then, in 1923. We moved over here, but he always wrote letters to us."
Thousands of volts were running between Kong, Lin, Alice, and Spencer.
Spencer reached for the edge of a rough table that stood nearby; he looked as if he was having trouble standing. "Alice, ask him. Did Teilhard say anything about Peking Man? About the bones he brought with him?"
Alice’s Chinese rendering dropped into a void of sucking silence. No one dared to draw the next breath.
Silence.
They waited.
Finally Ogatai spoke. "It is no good man who accepts guests, especially those with some connection to the family, without proper welcome. Since you have come, take your ease." He turned aside and addressed the two women in the doorway. Instantly they disappeared behind the whitewashed wall of beaten earth and returned with dried fruit and small, bright-colored plastic liquor cups.
They poured out the familiar red spirits, sweet, powerful. Everyone drank.
Ogatai said they should all come sit on the kang, the most pleasant spot in any northern home, winter or summer-but there was not enough room on the kang for everyone. Kong and Lin crowded onto a wooden bench opposite.