“May the Lord Jesus bless you for this, Renato,” Yu said, with no small emotion.
“We both serve Him as best we can. I thought of it, and it seemed something you might wish to have,” DiMilo replied, as he might to a good parish priest in Rome, for that was what Yu was, wasn’t it? Close enough, certainly.
For his part, Barry Wise cursed that he hadn’t quite gotten his camera running for that moment. “We don’t often see Catholics and Baptists this friendly,” the reporter observed.
Yu handled the answer, and this time the camera was rolling. “We are allowed to be friends. We work for the same boss, as you say in America.” He took DiMilo’s hand again and shook it warmly. He rarely received so sincere a gift, and it was so strange to get it here in Beijing from what some of his American colleagues called papists, and, an Italian one at that. Life really did have purpose after all. Reverend Yu had sufficient faith that he rarely doubted that, but to have it confirmed from time to time was a blessing.
The contractions came too fast, and too hard. Lien-Hua withstood it as long as she could, but after an hour, it felt as though someone had fired a rifle into her belly. Her knees buckled. She did her best to control it, to remain standing, but it was just too much. Her face turned pasty-white, and she collapsed to the cement floor. A co-worker was there at once. A mother herself, she knew what she beheld.
“It is your time?” she asked.
“Yes.” Delivered with a gasp and a painful nod.
“Let me run and get Quon.” And she was off at once. That bit of help was when things went bad for Lotus Flower.
Her supervisor noted one running employee, and then turned his head to see another prostrate one. He walked over, as one might to see what had happened after an automobile accident, more with curiosity than any particular desire to intervene. He’d rarely taken note of Yang Lien-Hua. She performed her function reliably, with little need for chiding or shouting, and was popular with her co-workers, and that was all he knew about her, really, and all that he figured he needed to know. There was no blood about. She hadn’t fallen from some sort of accident or mechanical malfunction. How strange. He stood over her for a few seconds, seeing that she was in some discomfort and wondering what the problem was, but he wasn’t a doctor or a medic, and didn’t want to interfere. Oh, if she’d been bleeding he might have tried to slap a bandage over the wound or something, but this wasn’t such a situation and so he just stood there, as he figured a manager should, showing that he was there, but not making things worse. There was a medical orderly in the first-aid room two hundred meters away. The other girl had probably run that way to fetch her, he thought.
Lien-Hua’s face contorted after a few minutes’ relative peace, as another contraction began. He saw her eyes screw closed and her face go pale, and her breathing change to a rapid pant. Oh, he realized, that’s it. How odd. He was supposed to know about such things, so that he could schedule substitutions on the line. Then he realized something else. This was not an authorized pregnancy. Lien-Hua had broken the rules, and that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it could reflect badly on his department, and on him as a supervisor…, and he wanted to own an. automobile someday.
“What is happening here?” he asked her.
But Yang Lien-Hua was in no shape to reply at the moment. The contractions were accelerating much faster than they’d done with Ju-Long. Why couldn’t this have waited until Saturday? she demanded of Destiny. Why does God wish my child to die aborting? She did her best to pray through the pain, doing her utmost to concentrate, to entreat God for mercy and help in this time of pain and trial and terror, but all she saw around her was more cause for fear.
There was no help in the face of her shop supervisor. Then she heard running feet again and looked to see Quon approaching, but before he got to her, the supervisor intercepted him.
“What goes on here?” the man demanded, with all the harshness of petty authority. “Your woman makes a baby here? An unauthorized baby?” the most minor of officials asked and accused in the same breath. “Ju hai he added: Bitch!
For his part, Quon wanted this baby as well. He hadn’t told his wife of the fears that he’d shared with her, because he felt that it would have been unmanly, but that last statement from the shop supervisor was a little much for a man under two kinds of simultaneous stress. Recalling his army training, Quon struck out with his fist, following his hand with an imprecation of his own:
“Pok gai,” literally, fall down in the street, but in context, Get the fuck out of my way! The shop supervisor gashed his head when he went down, giving Quon the satisfaction of seeing an injury to avenge the insult to his wife. But he had other things to do.
With the words said, and the blow struck, he lifted LienHua to her feet and supported her as best he could on the way to where their bicycles were parked. But, now what to do? Like his wife, Quon had wanted this all to happen at home, where at the worst she could call in sick. But he had no more power to stop this process than he did to stop the world from turning on its axis. He didn’t even have time or energy to curse fate. He had to deal with reality as it came, one shaky second at a time, and help his beloved wife as best he could.
“You were educated in America?” Wise asked, in front of the rolling camera.
“Yes,” Yu replied over tea. “At Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. My first degree was in electrical engineering, then my divinity degree and my ordination came later.”
“I see you are married,” the reporter observed, pointing to a picture on the wall.
“My wife is away in Taiwan, looking after her mother, who is sick at the moment,” he explained.
“So, how did you two meet?” Wise asked, meaning Yu and the Cardinal.
“That was Fa An’s doing,” the Cardinal explained. “It was he who came to us to extend a greeting to a newcomer in the same-same line of work, one could say.” DiMilo was tempted to say that they enjoyed drinks together, but refrained for fear of demeaning the man before his fellow Baptists, some of whom objected to alcohol in any form. “As you might imagine, there are not so many Christians in this city, and what few there are need to stick together.”
“Do you find it odd, a Catholic and a Baptist to be so friendly?”
“Not at all,” Yu replied at once. “Why should it be odd? Are we not united by faith?” DiMilo nodded agreement at this perfect, if unanticipated, statement of belief.
“And what of your congregation?” Wise asked the Chinese minister next.
The bicycle lot outside was a confused mass of metal and rubber, for few of the Chinese workers owned automobiles, but as Quon helped Lien-Hua to the far corner, the two of them were spotted by someone who did have access to one. He was a factory security guard who drove about the perimeter of the plant very importantly in his three-wheel motorized cart, an accessory more important to his sense of status than his uniform and badge. Like Quon, a former sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, he’d never lost his feeling of personal authority, and this communicated itself in the way he spoke to people.
“Stop!” he called from the driver’s seat in his cart. “What goes on here?”
Quon turned. Lien-Hua had just been hit with another contraction, with buckled knees and gasping breath, and he was almost dragging her to their bikes. Suddenly, he knew that this wasn’t going to work. There was just no way that she could pedal her own bike. It was eleven blocks to their apartment. He could probably drag her up the three flights of steps, but how the hell was he going to get her to the front door?
“My wife is… she’s hurt,” Quon said, unwilling- afraid-to explain what the problem really was. He knew this guard-his name was Zhou Jingjin-and he seemed a decent enough chap. “I’m trying to get her home.”