In the morning she woke up tired, with rings under her eyes. He didn’t look much better when he met her in the hall and went downstairs with her to breakfast. She wondered if he had stayed up too.
Now it was time to plan. He was spread out on his bus seat, thinking. Shanghai was long gone. They streaked along a flat, eight-lane highway, past delta farmland cut into green-ruffled squares.
Finally he said, “The meeting is just with the grandparents?”
“I think the child will be there too.”
“Any of them speak English?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Will they bring a translator?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think of that, since I needed to bring one anyway, just to get here.”
“That’s not really true,” he said.
“Consider my state of mind,” she answered.
“Okay,” he said. “Well. Say they do bring a translator. If that happens, then having me translate is not only redundant, it wastes whatever advantage I could offer you. So if it happens – just if – say I don’t speak Chinese. Say I’m your associate, or your lawyer.”
Maggie eyed his ponytail. “I don’t think you could pass for a lawyer.”
“I’m American. I can pass for anything.”
“To me you look Chinese.”
“Here I look foreign.”
They rode in silence. “Actually that’s good,” she said after a minute. “Though most likely you’ll be translating, so it’ll be moot.”
“And the most important thing will still be your strategy,” said Sam. “What kind of face you will put on, what you will project.”
“What do you suggest?”
“That depends. Let me give you an example.” He softened his voice. “What if you walk in and you meet this child and you see a girl who looks just like your husband? Are you prepared for that?”
“You can’t always tell by looking at a child.”
“No. But there are times when you can. Say it happens. Stop now to think: what will you show? Be ready. When people deal with each other here, no matter what it is, business, personal, big issues, small, a lot rides on the show. The theater. People put great energy into making things seem a certain way. It’s how things work. It’s why you can rent an office here for a month or a year but also for an hour – so you can pull off that important meeting by pretending the office is yours, right down to the secretary, the coffee, the co-workers who are possibly just your friends, dressed up for the day. Everybody does it – individuals, companies, the government. Everybody. Westerners get upset because they’re not used to it; they say it’s dishonest. Here though, everybody knows it’s happening and knows to always watch behind them, so there’s no deception. Put aside your old self. Think this way. They will.”
“Put on a show,” she said. “But what kind?”
“That depends on what you want. You want a sample, isn’t that right? Consent and a sample. Fast.”
“I’ve had the kit right here in my purse since I left L.A. The grandparents are the guardians; they’re the ones who have to agree.”
He nodded, thinking. Finally he said, “I think this is a job for guanxi.”
“What’s that?”
“Connectedness, relationship. If she is his daughter you will be connected to them. You will be like family. Have you thought about how that would feel?”
Yes, she had thought. It would be beyond belief that she could see something of Matt again, something living, going on. When she imagined it she could almost see another life for a second, as if through a break in clouds. It was like an opening into a sweet valley.
He was watching her. “Well,” he said, “feel that, think that. Project your welcome for them, and for her. Believe that you want what they want.”
“So they’ll want to have the test.”
“Exactly.”
“But how do I do that?” she said.
“The Chinese way of answering that would be to tell a story.” He waited until she smiled with her eyes to go on.
“It’s the story of the Sword-Grinding Rain,” he said. “There was this famous general, Guan Gong. Now he’s the God of War, but like a lot of Chinese Gods he was once a real person. He lived in the Three Kingdoms period, around the beginning of the third century.
“So Guan Gong had this famous, incredible sword called Green Dragon on the Moon. He was a great fighter. And one day he was invited to a banquet by the evil Duke, archenemy of his lord. Don’t go! his friends all cried – it’s a trap! No, he said, I must go. And he went, alone. He took no one. At the door of the Duke’s mansion men surrounded him, as he had known they would, and ordered him to surrender his sword, Green Dragon on the Moon, which he did.
“From there, into the banquet chamber. All the lords of the enemy kingdom were seated. No guards or men with weapons were visible, but he saw the ornately paneled walls ringing the room and he knew what those panels meant. Each concealed an assassin, armored, quick, ready to impale him. He was unarmed. He had only one weapon, himself. Just his courage and his intelligence.
“So he bowed low to his hosts, paid them compliments, and offered wishes of health and longevity for their families. Then as the meal was served he started to talk. No one knows what he said, so many times has the story been retold in eighteen centuries, but supposedly he held their attention for hours while he made the case that they should be friends instead of enemies. At the end not only did all at the table stand and applaud, but the very assassins who had been ordered to leap forth and kill him stepped out, cast down their weapons, and embraced him. It was the guanxi of genius.”
She stared at him.
“This is what you need to do with the family.”
“Like that’s going to be easy to do?”
“No one said it would be easy,” he said. “It’s delicate, subtle, difficult, but not impossible. It’s basically an attitude; when you walk in, are you with them or against them? Anyway, when Guan Gong left the banquet that night a servant knelt and offered him back his sword. No sooner had Guan Gong taken Green Dragon on the Moon from him than it was lifted right out of his hands and whirled up to heaven by the Gods. It has been there ever since. Around the banquet’s anniversary every June, in Beijing, it rains a special rain. That’s when the Gods take out Green Dragon on the Moon and polish it. Everybody calls it the Sword-Grinding Rain.”
She thought. “It’s September now,” she said finally, “but maybe it will fall.” And indeed, when she raised her eyes and looked down the aisle past the driver, through the big curved windshield, she saw that the road ahead led straight toward a lowering sky.
7
There is always a tension between imagination and reality, between what we wish for and what it is the Gods have granted us. Civilized man finds appeasement through the system of gestures and symbols used to mediate between the two – the careful grooming of appearances, the maintenance of face, the funeral feasts and wedding banquets we put on even as we know they will ruin us. Rich or poor, people feel the same. During my childhood in the alleys of Peking, we were always hungry. If we ate at all it was cu cha dan fan, crude tea and bland rice. Yet on this we never failed to congratulate ourselves, as if this were our choice, our philosophy. We would proclaim simple but nutritious fare the best, and our lives, for a moment, would satisfy us.
– LIAN G WEI, The Last Chinese Chef