“I guess when there isn’t much land, you go up.”
She didn’t reply.
They watched the city flow by them. Stop after stop. People got off and others then got on.
“Where are we going?” Fred asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe we can stay on the bus for a while. It’s like a motel on wheels.”
“Except for no food or bathroom.”
“I know. But we can get off and get food and go to the bathroom, then get back on another bus and sit down again.”
“How long can we do that?”
“Till I figure out what to do next!”
“Okay okay. You’re right. I don’t have a better idea, and in the meantime it’s what we’ve got.”
They sat there pressed side to side. They were spending a lot of time in physical contact, it seemed to Fred. He was getting familiar with her heft, her smell. The sheen of her black hair. The details of her body’s shape, such as the way the flare of her hips was about as wide as her shoulders. Her abilities as an athlete. Her character. She rested her head against his shoulder again; she seemed to feel no hesitation in doing that. She accepted him as a known quantity.
At a stop somewhere near Central, with a view up one wide street to the ferry terminal where they had debarked from the boat the previous evening, three men got on the bus and came back and stood over them. They spoke in Chinese. Qi spoke back sharply, looking surprised.
Fred stared at them, at her. Qi said something to them in a low choked voice, and they looked startled, then annoyed.
Fred almost asked what was going on, then almost stood up, but she took his hand in hers and squeezed it, keeping him in place while she was saying something sharp to them.
Finally she glanced at him. “Come on,” she said. “They’ve got us.”
TA SHU 5
da huozhe xiao
Big or Small
I walk the streets of my town and look at its people. My fellow citizens. Here a gang of young men in rainbow shirts, slouching by in their foxi Zen whateverism, white baseball caps worn at a tilt. I like them. Women’s black hair everywhere gleaming in the sun. I like black hair in all its variety. Also the white hair that follows black hair in old age. I am a white-haired old man, but I still like black hair. An old man, even older than me, sits at his corner brazier cooking pork strips for sale. I exchange greetings with him, I stop to look around. Street trees in the sunset, their fake silk blossoms incandescent in horizontal light. Green Beijing is always such a joy to see, and also to smelclass="underline" the clean air, dinners cooking, and no traffic exhaust, strange but true. The old north-south orientation of the city, with the elite in the north and the poor to the south, has mostly gone away. The Maoists built great Chang’an Avenue to cut that north-south orientation in half, marking the new China with an east-west stroke of immense calligraphic power. Broad tree-lined boulevard, big public buildings monumentally flanking it, orientation directing the eye to the sinking sun like some Paleolithic astro-archeology. This powerful feng shui was the work of some great geomancer, possibly Zhou Enlai, I don’t recall.
My hometown is crowded. When is Beijing not crowded? Even at three a.m. it’s crowded. I like the feel of all that action. Faces bright with life, people pursuing their project of the hour. Everyone is comfortable among their fellow Beijingers, we are like fish in water. Other people are just clear water to us, we swim through our fellows, we move together like a school of fish. What I can see of Beijing now is like a small town on market night—it’s just that there are a hundred thousand blocks just like it, running out from here across the land in all directions. So it is both crowded and uncrowded at one and the same time.
That happens so often here. Put it this way: anything you can say about China that you think might be true, the opposite statement will also be true. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
Say for instance that China is big. Fair enough; it is big. A billion and a half people, one of every six people on Earth, living on a big chunk of Asia, in a country with the longest continuous history of any country. Big!
Then turn it around and say: China is small.
And this too is true. I see it right here on this corner. Introverted, authoritarian, monocultural, patriarchal; a small-minded place, with one history, one language, one party, one morality. So small! Think for instance of the way the Ministry of Propaganda now speaks of the Five Poisons, meaning the Uigurs, the Tibetans, the Taiwanese, the democracy advocates, and the Falun Gong. Poisons? Really? This is so small. It reduces China to just Han people who support the Party unequivocally. That’s a small number, maybe smaller than the Ministry of Propaganda imagines. The Party exists on the people’s sufferance. Mao used to speak of the fifty-five ethnic groups of the Chinese people. And we have two major languages, not one; putonghua is common, but Cantonese is spoken by one hundred million people, including many of the Chinese who live outside China, making them a political force of a very important kind. Not to mention the fifty-five ethnic languages, and so on. So, not the Five Poisons, please; rather the Five Loves, as taught in all our elementary schools: love of China, love of the Chinese people, love of work for China, love of scientific knowledge, love of socialism. These are the Big Five, as opposed to the Small Five of the supposed poisons. I myself frequently feel all the Five Loves, as I suppose many of you do.
So, looking around and thinking about this, face after face, street after street, building after building, to be fair I have to admit that it seems more accurate to say that China is big than to say that it’s small. I could walk the streets of this city for the next ten years and never walk the same block twice. But you take my point, I hope. We think in pairs and quadrants, and in threes and nines, and every concept has its opposite embedded in it as part of its definition. So we can say, in just that way: China is simple, China is complicated. China is rich, China is poor. China is proud, China is forever traumatized by its century of humiliation. On it goes, each truth balanced by its opposite, until all the combinations come to this, which actually I think has no valid opposite: China is confusing. To say China is easy to understand—no. I don’t know anyone who would say that. It would be a little crazy to say that.
So, with that admitted, we become like the people in the indoor/outdoor workshop I am passing right now. Here men and women toil with admirable focus to carve mammoth tusks from Siberia into hollowed-out sculptures of the most amazingly meticulous and intricate figuration. We are like these dexterous workers, and our idea of China is like one of these mammoth tusks. We chip away at it, and sliver by sliver we carve an elaborate model of China, something we can see and touch and try to understand. The model can explain things to us, it can be beautiful. But remember it is never China.
AI 5
wolidou
Infighting
“Comrade, I have another alert for you.”
“Tell me.”
“A back channel into the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection headquarters overheard a message from a commission field team stationed in its Hong Kong office, reporting to Beijing. Two of their agents in Hong Kong observed another team of agents arresting Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks.”
“Discipline inspection agents observed other agents?”
“Yes. Those commission agents reporting this arrest to Beijing sounded displeased at this new development, saying they had located Chan and Fredericks getting on a bus in west Hong Kong, and were following the two to see if they would lead the agents to a safe house where they suspect someone must have been hiding the two young people since the time they disappeared from Shekou. Now, instead, the two are in the custody of this other group.”