“Gao Lan’s working as hard as she can at the logistics start-up,” Gao Fei said, in Mandarin so Shuying wouldn’t understand. “I don’t think she can work any harder. This is her rice bowl. It’s important.”
“I know,” I said, and I did. I had promised myself I would never forget. Even now. “Tell her yes,” I said, turning to Sheng. “Tell her we give our permission.”
Sheng conveyed this, and the American woman drew a small box out of her shoulder bag.
“Little Dumpling,” my husband said to her in the local Shaoxing tongue, “I want you to let Auntie touch a stick inside your mouth.”
The widow got up, took a few steps, and knelt in front of the child. Her face was serious. Now it could not be stopped.
She unscrewed a vial and took out a swab.
I was unable to look. I busied myself by pouring a cup of tea for the long-haired man, who still sat in a watchful silence across the table. Something about him needled me. Who was he, really? I filled the cup, set down the pot, and then reached forward with my two hands, offering it. This was an old-fashioned gesture. Any civilized person knew that the cup must be taken with two hands as well. Outsiders rarely knew. I think I wanted to see him falter, show his ignorance. Maybe I even wanted to feel the brief comfort of derision, at the very moment I felt frightened that I might have lost something. I extended the cup.
Without seeming even to think, he lifted two hands to take it. As was civilized. Proper. My eyes narrowed. Was it an accident? No. I felt something in the air of the room change. He was not an outsider.
Yet the thought barely had time to form in my mind. “Open your mouth for Auntie,” I heard my husband say.
Maggie and Sam stepped out the front gate of the complex, walked to the corner, and veered left onto busy Jiefang Lu before they turned to each other, ready to burst with all they had to say. “We did it,” she breathed first. She had the signed forms and the sample in her bag.
“You were wonderful,” he told her.
“You were.”
“We both were. And you haven’t heard anything yet.” He raised his hand for a taxi.
“Where are we going?”
“Hangzhou, are you kidding? As fast as possible, to mail your sample. Then get me to my uncle’s.” A car pulled over and they climbed in. “Next bus is on the half-hour.” They settled in the back. “Now. Are you ready for this? There were two men in Gao Lan’s life. Two foreigners – at the same time. The right time. Either one could be the father. They don’t know which.”
She stared. “Then why Matt?”
“For some reason Gao Lan’s afraid of the other guy. Wouldn’t approach him. Wouldn’t file against him. That’s why this came to you.”
Maggie swallowed down this new and slightly darker understanding. The taxi jolted to a stop outside the bus station. They paid, jumped out, and ran into a concrete palace of a depot far too large and full of useless echoes for its light trickle of passengers. After buying their tickets they went to stand in line at the gate. “You know what doesn’t quite make sense?” said Maggie. “That she doesn’t know who the father is. Shuying is not a baby. She’s a girl. She must look more like one than the other.”
“Well, you saw her too,” said Sam. “What do you say? Is she Matt’s?”
Maggie thought a long time. “I suppose I can’t be sure. Maybe. She could be.”
“If you had to guess?”
She hesitated. “I’d guess no.”
“Before you went in, did you want her to be his?”
“Not at first. Definitely not. Later – I have to say, I thought about it. He’s gone, is the thing. It would be like part of him came back. It would be like something happened that he wanted, too, wanted at least by the end of his life, and that was to have a kid.”
“He wanted a kid?”
“Not at first. By the end.”
“You never had one.”
“No. Neither did you,” she added, as if compelled.
“I was never married.”
“Well, I was, I had a family. Matt and I were a family, a family of two.” She paused. “Then he wanted three. I couldn’t go up to that number. At least not so fast.”
The bus pulled away and quickly climbed onto an open highway with little traffic, only a few whizzing cars and trucks. On both sides of the road were factories, extending for miles. “You okay?” said Sam.
“Yes. Fine.” She wiped at her eyes.
“You should be happy. You did great today. You got what you wanted.”
“It was luck,” she said.
“Maybe. But I told you the story and you applied it. And the heavens, in case you haven’t noticed, are about to salute you.” He aimed a triumphant look through the bus window to the world outside. They had left the line of factories behind and now were crossing the flat river country – low, green, featureless, brimming with insects and birds and unseen creatures. In front of the bus, the straight ribbon road narrowed to a point. Black clouds grumbled above it. “You know what that is?”
“A storm?”
He gave the wry smile that said no. The bus barreled into the dark bulkhead of sky. The pressure dropped. Daylight ebbed away as electricity rose. They could feel the dark charge in the air around them. Grass rippled across the marshes.
Lightning flashed up ahead; then thunder rumbled. She saw that he was smiling next to her. The first drops came down and the big wipers at the front of the bus started up. She watched, mesmerized. Big drops tapped on the roof and the windows, a few at first, and then more quickly until the rain poured on them, a furious volley, a fusillade of gunshots slamming the roof and spraying all over the windows. It was like going through a car wash.
“Do you know what it is yet?” Sam said.
She shook her head. Water was sheeting across the road. The wheels sent up fans of spray. The wetlands were cloaked with darkness.
He leaned close so she could hear him, and said, “It’s the Sword-Grinding Rain.”
8
The major cuisines of China were brought into being for different purposes, and for different kinds of diners. Beijing food was the cuisine of officials and rulers, up to the Emperor. Shanghai food was created for the wealthy traders and merchants. From Sichuan came the food of the common people, for, as we all know, some of the best-known Sichuan dishes originated in street stalls. Then there is Hangzhou, whence came the cuisine of the literati. This is food that takes poetry as its principal inspiration. From commemorating great poems of the past to dining on candlelit barges afloat upon West Lake where wine is drunk and new poems are created, Hangzhou cuisine strives always to delight men of letters. The aesthetic symmetry between food and literature is a pattern without end.
– LIAN G WEI, The Last Chinese Chef
Sam had told her Hangzhou centered on a magnificent man-made lake, and that if she wanted to spend the night downtown while he stayed at his uncle’s, he could book her at a hotel with a room facing the water. It sounded nice, but so far nothing Maggie had seen of the crowded gray city into which their bus disgorged them even hinted at such a fairyland. The streets, crawling with cars, were narrow canyons of glass-and-steel buildings. Sam waved over a taxi, explaining that the DHL office was outside town. She climbed in beside him, grateful. The rain had stopped, and everything was wet and washed clean.
They soared on a half-empty freeway along a river, past farm fields and intermittent housing developments, to an enormous and newly built business park. In this labyrinth the driver somehow found his way to the DHL office with its fleet of red-and-yellow trucks, and with Sam translating she signed forms and paid and dispatched the package. Done. She walked out feeling oddly numb. Her steps seemed heavy, the building and the parking lot unreal. It was finished. It was sent. She climbed back into the car, not quite believing it.