Lost in Translation, page 8
"Oh, this is nothing," she said lightly. "Shanghai’s much more crowded than this."
"More crowded than this?" Following her, he split the xiao bing open and stuffed in the steaming shredded lamb, then added a squirt of hot sauce from the common bottle on the table. "But the strange thing is, I haven’t seen any street people, any beggars. Have I missed something? Are there street people here?"
"There are a few beggars. Though you don’t see homeless people, people living outdoors like you see in America. But there’s something else, that actually runs into millions of people. The floating population."
He paused, bing half up to his mouth. "Floating population."
"Right. People without housing registrations. A housing registration is the key to life in China. Without it you can’t get an apartment, get free medical care, work in the system, or buy food that’s on ration."
"And why is it millions of people can’t get housing registrations?"
"It’s not that they can’t get them. They can. They just don’t want to live where their housing registration is, in some poverty-stricken remote village or wherever, so they leave and go someplace else. Someplace where they’re not registered. They join the floating population."
"So then where do they live?"
"On the margins. Some of them get rich. But most of them—well—crash somewhere, if you know what I mean. Stay with friends, or relatives. Patch something together."
He bit into his bing. "Alice, you were right. This is great. And for street food! Oh. Here. I almost forgot." He dug into his pocket and handed her a small, two-inch-square newspaper clipping.
Lucile Swan, 75, died May 2, 1965, at her home in New York. Noted artist and lifelong confidante of the Catholic mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The cause was heart failure....
"Her obituary," Alice smiled. "Where did you get it?"
"When I first started researching all this I went back and poked around a little bit in New York. That’s where Teilhard died too. But they didn’t see that much of each other in those last years, even though they both lived in New York."
"There was a lot of bitterness—she was resentful and jealous," Alice said. "I can tell from their letters, the book we bought at Zhoukoudian. It’s fascinating."
"Really?" He ate thoughtfully.
"Oh, yes. I can really relate to her life. What I wouldn’t have given to have had somebody like her, so smart, so aware, for a mother."
"What was your mother like?" He added more hot sauce.
"Died when I was a baby. Never had one."
He looked up, penetrating. "That’s too bad. God. Some life. At least you have your dad."
"Who?"
"Your dad."
"Oh, you mean Horace." She smiled wryly. "I never call him Dad."
"You don’t?" He stared for a second. "Hey. Look. I’ve been meaning to apologize for bringing all that up, the first day we met, at breakfast. You know, the Alice Speech. I know it made you uncomfortable. I feel bad about it. I won’t mention your father at all if you like."
"I don’t really care that much," she said, staring at the obituary. "I hate everything he stands for. Basically, I don’t have anything to do with him."
"Ah." He examined her face. "That simple?"
"That simple."
"Well. Anyway." He nodded at the newspaper clipping. "I got to wondering about Lucile’s death, so I looked up the records. This is all I found." He saw how Alice was looking at it. "Why don’t you keep it?" he said kindly. "It’s not like I need it for the research."
"Really? Are you sure? I’d like to have this."
"Keep it." He resumed eating. Just then the Chinese couple on their left got up to leave, and the man pushed against Alice so hard, she almost fell into Spencer’s lap. Instead of apologizing he muttered, "Waiguoren," Foreigner, and stalked off.
Spencer stared after him. "The Chinese don’t like us too much, huh?"
"Not a bit," she said. "We’re barbarians. Ghosts. Even the lowest laborer feels superior to the most educated, most successful foreigner. You’ll see."
"That must be hard for you, being an American."
She tore into her third bing. "I’m not what you’d really call an American," she said between bites. "And believe it or not, that attitude is actually one of the things about the place I find appealing." She could feel his stare, but there was no use explaining. He’d never understand the safe, settled feeling it gave her to be a foreigner in China, an outside person, barely tolerated. The way the geometry of her world seemed righted here, all weights and balances, all retributions, called into play.
He put down his bing and pushed his plate away. "Best lamb I’ve had in years. But I can’t finish it."
She eyed his food. "Really? You’re not going to eat any more?"
"No."
She pulled it over and started in.
"Alice. How do you do it?"
"I don’t know. I just do."
"But you’re so—so slim!"
"Yeah. I keep eating and eating, and I don’t get fat. Sometimes I even think I’m trying—to pack something in around me. And then other times I realize that actually, I’m not even hungry. But I just keep eating anyway."
Alice sat on the bed naked except for the antique red silk stomach-protector, two strings tied around her neck, two around her waist. It was no more than a silk trapezoid with four strings. As an undergarment its purpose had never been clear to Alice, for it covered only the belly and left the breasts and the genitals bare. She had always assumed its function had been to conserve qi, the vital energy traditionally thought to be centered around the navel—but she wasn’t sure. In any case she felt good in it, and it suited her, since she never wore a bra. She loved the way she felt in it, especially when she went out at night.
She opened the book of Teilhard and Lucile’s letters to a passage she had marked the night before, this a letter Teilhard had written to Lucile: Sometimes, I think I would like to vanish before you into some thing which would be bigger than myself,— your real yourself, Lucile, — your real life, your God. And then I should be yours, completely.
Her real self, Alice thought, her real life. Somehow Lucile had accomplished a thing Alice had only imagined: gotten her true core coupled with Teilhard. Even if they’d never fully committed to each other.
She put the book down and opened The Phenomenon of Man. To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul, in a coherent manner ... Had Pierre and Lucile achieved that? Maybe. Though Lucile’s letters and diary entries—also included in the book—made it clear she was dissatisfied. The live, physical, real you, all of you. I want you so terribly and I’m trying so hard to understand....
She rolled over on her stomach and dropped the books to the floor. She figured she, Alice, could connect the body and the soul—definitely, she could, if she just found the right man. A Chinese man, maybe. Though would there ever be one who’d accept her?
Of all the men she’d known, only Jian had come close. He’d understood her; he’d taken the time. But in the end he didn’t love her enough to fight for her. His separateness, his Chineseness, had won.
And who had she known who’d truly accepted her? Who’d been truly, seamlessly unconditional?
Only Horace.
God. She groaned and covered her eyes. He never understood her, it was true, but he was loyal and he never wavered. It was a kind of love. Punishing maybe, unfair, controlling, but love nevertheless.
Like the day she graduated from Rice University.
He had flown in early. As a senior member of the Texas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, Horace didn’t get back home to Houston much. But she knew he would come to her graduation from anywhere. From Boston. From Bahrain.
She could still see the dorm room, the books and typewriter and stereo packed in their boxes, the posters down, the bare-box walls bereft. Outside, the sweat-bath Houston summer was already rising from the ground in waves. Then he got off the elevator. She could hear the special tap of his walk. She felt the ripple of recognition, the thrill that followed him as he strode down the hall.
He stepped in the door, saw her. His face brightened with joy. "Too long, darling." He put his arms around her and squeezed. "So good to see you."
"You too." She smiled. He was someone who’d always known her. At school she’d been mostly on her own.
"I’m proud of you, Alice." He stood back and admired her.
"Thanks. Hard to believe it’s over." She looked balefully around the room. "And still so much to pack!"
"Go on, continue. I’ll watch." He sat on her plastic desk-chair in his gray tropical suit and wine-colored tie. He was a small man, exact, articulate. When he was onstage he grew to evangelical stature—but now, in repose, it was easy to see why he was the perfect elected official, conservative, smiling, devoted to the business and progress of the South. "Congratulations. And graduating cum laude too!"
"Oh, Horace." She’d gone back to pulling folded clothes out of her bureau drawers and stacking them in their cardboard box.
"Really, sweetheart, I mean it. You’ve done a great job."
She let out a modest laugh.
"And now you can come to work."
She looked up sharply. Had he said come to work?
"You see, I’ve talked it over with Roger." Happiness played around her father’s mouth, so proud and pleased was he with the prize he had to offer. "You know Roger oversees all my staff needs. And he’s already terminated someone so that the assistant-director position in the head office in Washington is open. For you." He beamed.
"Horace." She stared, stricken, the words all mashed up in her throat. "I can’t work for you."
"Now, honey, I know what you’re thinking. Working for Daddy!"
My God, she thought.
"But you won’t report to me, or Roger. We have it all worked out—"
"No," she interrupted. "It’s impossible. I can’t be around your life, your people. The things you stand for." If there was one thing she knew by then, by age twenty-two, it was that she had to get far away and stay away. Here in his world she was trapped in an intolerable corner, which seemed to grow tighter and tighter each year. And now no place in America felt right.
How clearly she remembered the night she’d first realized it.
She’d been only eleven then, exactly half her age on that day of college graduation. It was a regular dinner at the home of Janie Boudreau, her best friend from school. Alice was a frequent guest. She knew the Boudreaus felt sorry for her— there was no mother in Alice’s big house, only Horace and a housekeeper.
On this night Janie’s older cousin was there, visiting from Dallas. "So you’re the Alice, aren’t you?" He looked at her hard, through narrowed eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"Well—you’re Horace Mannegan’s girl, aren’t you?"
"Yes." She glanced quickly at her friend. Janie’s eyes slid away.
"I knew it! You’re the one who didn’t want to go to school with colored kids, right?"
"No," Alice insisted. It hadn’t been her idea! Not her, never.
"Yeah—come on. I remember. You didn’t want to go to a mixed school! Then your father made that speech, then the riots got started, and that’s how those girls got killed."
"It wasn’t me," she pleaded. "I never said—"
"Of course it was you! You’re Alice Mannegan. Alice Mannegan! Right, Aunt Dee? Huh?"
"Yes, Jackson," Janie’s mother had said in a quietly stern voice. "But Alice is Janie’s friend. Let’s talk about something else. Come. Who wants dessert?"
By that point, though, a messy silence had squashed down over the table. Everyone avoided everyone else’s eyes. The meal scraped to a nauseated conclusion.
It was only the first time, the first of many. After that night she’d known she was doomed. And she was. She grew up in the center of it, everyone’s lightning rod for pity, loathing, fascination, the whole freight train of emotions that followed the charging tension between the races.
Now, packing up her dorm room at Rice, she looked at her father, stunned. What he was suggesting was horrible, unthinkable. And as usual he didn’t even see it.
"I can’t work for you! Sorry, but it’s out of the question. Everyplace I went I’d be the ’Alice’ from the ’Alice Speech’! Especially in Washington. I’d never get away from it."
"Alice!" He got up, disturbed, and circled his chair a couple of times. "That speech was years ago! And we were only trying to restore a little bit of what was so good about America, what this great country has lost—"
"Like slavery?" she said bitterly.
"Please," he said mildly, as if she referred to something that was simply a bygone fashion and not a searing fount of human shame. "All I did was make a speech. It’s not as if I went out and burned the Fourth Ward down."
What? Her mouth fell open.
Just then a giggling group of girls stopped outside the open door.
"It isn’t—"
"I told you, her father’s Horace Mannegan!"
"Alice, is that your daddy?"
"No," she said sullenly. "It’s Horace."
"See! I told you, it’s him."
"You go in!"
"You!"
"Mr. Mannegan, sir, may I have your autograph?" The girl had long honey-colored limbs, short blond hair, and a string of pearls over her pale green silk blouse. The hand that thrust the pen and paper toward him had perfectly manicured pink nails.
"Yes, of course, dear." Horace smiled benignly, uncapped his gold corporate-looking pen, and signed. "We’ll be counting on your support in the next election."
"Oh, yes! Yes, sir! My parents—we always vote for you, sir!"
"Good. Don’t ever give up on this great country of ours."
"No, sir!"
"Here. Anyone else?" He signed autographs for all of them.
"Thank you, sir! Bye, Alice!"
"Bye," she said, hating them.
Horace turned back to her the instant they were gone and she saw his composed, boardroom mask drop away and leave, in its place, a father’s hurt and confusion. "I always assumed you would come to work for me."
Alice closed her eyes.
"I need you, Alice. I ... depend on you."
"I know," she said. He depended on her to be the family in his life. When she was young, and living with him, she was the one who’d made sure he ate right, who told him it was time to stop working and go to bed. No one else ever told him he needed rest, or he was drinking too much, or he ought to cancel a meeting or an airplane trip because he was sick. She did. And he showered her with most everything she wanted in return. Everything except the freedom to be what she wanted to be—whatever that was. She had to break away. Whether he liked it or not. She had to.
Tell him. "Horace, I’m going to China."
"Where?"
"China."
"China! Why?"
"Please, Horace! You are aware, aren’t you, that for the last four years I’ve been earning a degree in Chinese?"
"Yes, but—"
"And that I visited there last summer? And loved it?"
"Yes, but—you don’t mean you really want to live over there? In China?"
He had gone silent, and she had started to cry herself, because after all she was leaving him. And it hurt him. Despite all her tangled emotions she didn’t want to cause him pain like this, him, her own—she could barely form the word in her mind—father. But she knew she had to go. And finally he had said all right, if it was what she wanted, he would go along with it.
And he had. He had bombarded her with love, and sent her regular checks every month, for the past fourteen years. The only time he had gone to war with her was over Jian. And he’d won. She hadn’t fallen in love since.
Ah. Alice lay back on the bed, feeling the knotted silk strings under her backbone, the scratchy chenille bedspread against her bare skin. Love. The love of her father. Love of her mother, which she’d never known. And grown-up love, or what passed for it, in whose arms she could always briefly forget before moving on.
She shifted on the bed. Mother Meng was right. She was getting too old now. Soon, she was going to have to make some kind of change.
Her eyes wandered to the dark crack of the Beijing night barely showing along the edge of the curtain. She reached down and fingered the soft embroidered silk of the stomach-protector.
Should she go out?
A few hours later, at the shift change down in the hotel lobby, Second Night Clerk Huang told First Morning Clerk Shen that the foreigner Mo Ai-li had left on her bicycle just before midnight.
"Ah, then I’ll watch for her return."
"Around dawn."
"Yes, around dawn." First Morning Clerk Shen smiled to himself. That was the time Mo Ai-li always came back. Her face would be soft and her yin would be satisfied—for a while. Aiya, the outside people! So strange and secretive about their coupling. So entertaining to watch.
"I’m sorry we could not accept your invitation for dinner," Vice Director Han said as he ushered them into his office. "You understand, we are so busy."
"Yes," Alice said politely, "we understand." She glanced quickly at Adam. She had explained to him that this refusal was not a good sign.
"Nevertheless I am trying to make some arrangements for Dr. Spencer to do his research in the Northwest. Why did I ask you here today? I want you to meet two of our scientists." He pressed the button on the side of his desk and his secretary put her head into the room. "Show them in."
She nodded and opened the door wider for two Chinese men.
"Professor Kong Zhen of Huabei University." Vice Director Han indicated one of them.
"Interpreter Mo Ai-li," Alice responded, and handed the man her name card. He looked to her like one of those too-thin Chinese men who seemed vaguely unkempt in Western clothes and really belonged in the loose robes of a feudal Chinese gentleman. Instead he wore Western suit pants with a cell phone clipped to his belt. His face was long, narrow, and flat. "And this is Dr. Adam Spencer, from America," she said.
"Spencer Boshi," Professor Kong said to Adam. He smiled, showing less-than-perfect teeth. "I confess I’m relieved," he told Alice. "At least there’s one of you who can talk!"
