* * *
The large outdoor pool at the Youyi, one of the few in northern China, had opened in the middle of May. It was for the use of staff and guests and as long-term residents we were allowed, within certain limits, to invite our friends from outside the compound to use the facilities. I often invited Ma to come swimming after I’d finished with my classes at Beida and if the day were exceptionally warm he would sometimes accept. On one such day we were lying on our towels on the hot concrete deck, Ma and Talya on their stomachs talking to each other and me on my back just watching a high white cloud move slowly by, when there was a high-pitched scream from the far end of the pool and I sat up in time to see a man who had obviously come off the seven-meter diving board and then crumple and fall sideways into the water. The blur that went by me as I started to react was Ma; he must have come off the deck at the beginning of the scream and his leap from the edge of the pool put him almost under the board as the man slid into the water. Almost, but not quite. The man sank like a stone and Ma went after him. Before he surfaced several others were in the water to help. We got the man up onto the deck and someone started to give him mouth-to-mouth assistance, but as we had dragged him out his head had lolled at a strange angle and as I looked at Ma I could see that he knew the man was dead. I glanced up at the platform, shading my eyes from the glare of the sun off the white concrete; a lone Chinese girl in a blue tank suit stood leaning over one of the metal side-rails, her mouth open and her eyes wide with terror as she watched what was happening below her. I saw Ma glance up too and then he made his way through the crowd to the platform’s ladder and started to climb. I walked over and waited at the bottom. It took a few minutes but eventually they came down, Ma descending first, one hand on one of the railings and the other supporting the sobbing girl as she followed him down.
By the time the police arrived to take statements from each of us and to remove the body, Ma had calmed the girl by talking to her in a quiet, steady voice, explaining that it was an accident, a fatal miscalculation on the man’s part, and that she could have done absolutely nothing to prevent it. I could understand most of what he said to her but it was his compassion, his gentle yet firm manner with her, that impressed me even more. He seemed to have decided, as soon as it was clear that the man was dead, that his attention should be focused on aiding the living. When the police concluded their interviews they ordered the pool closed for the rest of the day and Talya and I walked with Ma to the main gate of the compound where he had left his bicycle.
“Someone told me the man was a foreign expert from Brazil,” Talya said. “He polished up the translations for the Portuguese broadcasts down at the radio station.”
“A weird accident,” I added. “To hit that three meter board from the high platform is no easy task. You’d almost have to aim for the damn thing.”
“Either that or the man was extremely careless,” Ma said. “The girl is a fu-yuen who works in Number One building and she says he stood on the edge of the platform for a long time, maybe a minute or two, before going off. She was near the edge as well and she watched him go down and hit the board and then slide into the water. She is very upset by all this, but she thinks she remembers that his arms were not out in front of his head when he hit the board. She can’t understand that and it seems to trouble her more than anything else. I explained to her that what she thinks she saw from that angle may have been distorted. It is unfortunate, but I believe she will never again go swimming in that pool after what has happened there today. She could have done nothing to prevent the man’s death, of course, but I am sure she will never be completely convinced of that. She is young, however, and in time she may learn to live with her doubts and her uncertainties.”
Two days after the incident at the pool I received a letter at the office, hand-delivered by an embassy driver. It was from Boaz and it informed me that Noah and Larry and I would soon be getting an invitation to each give a lecture in Guilin and he would appreciate my contacting a Miss Yun Lu there. She worked on the main floor of the Friendship Store, in the jewelry section, and I was to give her the enclosed envelope containing ten one-hundred-dollar bills.
I opened the envelope – it had the flap folded inside, unsealed, as if he expected the contents to be checked – and counted the stiff new American bills. As I licked the flap and sealed the money inside I had the feeling that I should shed something of myself, that I should somehow wriggle out of an old and rotting skin and let a second epidermal layer breathe freely.
The following afternoon Ma came to the office to let us know that Beida had received a request for our services at a conference to be held in Guilin and if we agreed to go he would make arrangements for us to fly down there for two days. I could think of no plausible excuse for not going so I nodded my acquiescence to Larry and Noah’s enthusiastic response. Five days later Ma was checking us into Guilin’s nicest hotel and quietly insisting that the three of us qualified for the officially approved long-term foreign expert’s reduced rate for accommodations when on business away from our danwei.
Larry had to give his presentation on the afternoon of the first day and Ma had to go with him, but Noah and I weren’t needed until the next morning so we took a boat ride up the river to get a good look at the strange volcanic rock formations that brought so many tourists, both Chinese and foreign, to Guilin. It was one of the more memorable sights in a country filled with scenes worth remembering. The day was sunny and warm and the clear blue sky served as a perfect backdrop to the dark jagged hills that rose directly out of the quiet water, dark irregular piles of stone and earth and hardened lava that appeared to rise from the water without benefit of beach or shoreline or any gradual inclination at all, black shapes whose immediacy was part of their strangeness in a land more generally given over to flat paddies and gently terraced hillsides. The abrupt mountains of Guilin made me think of the barren and the fantastic, of the sudden and unpredictable formations of the dark side of the soul, of the black threat of chaos suddenly superimposed on the clear placid world of order and apparent calm. They were beautiful and enticing and frighteningly unusual.
Noah saw them differently.
“Figures out of a child’s imagination. Sand castles put together on a black sand beach by a giant toddler who knows nothing about the basic principles of construction. They remind me of the boulders thrown up by storms along the California and Oregon coasts, aberrations that mar the otherwise beautiful surface of a place. Have to avoid them, surf around them, or run the risk of breaking your board and your body on them. Nice to look at from a distance, a pain in the ass to deal with up close.”
The boat ride lasted almost two hours and when we returned to the dock Noah went back to the hotel to take a nap before dinner. I made my way to the Friendship Store and walked around on the main floor for about ten minutes, staying away from the jewelry section at first and then only looking casually at the merchandise as I passed the first of two salesgirls. I stopped to inspect a gold brooch shaped like a dragon and the second attendant came to the end of the counter to help me.
“Is there something you wish to look at more closely?”
“I was told at my hotel that a Miss Yun Lu worked here and that she might be able to help me pick out a suitable pin for my wife. She sold something to someone else at my hotel and they were very satisfied. They suggested I ask for Miss Yun Lu.”
“Yun Lu is not here now. Do you want me to show you something?”
“Of course. May I see that gold dragon?”
When she went off a few minutes later to wrap it for me the other salesgirl moved quickly down the counter to stand in front of me. She spoke in a barely audible voice.
“I am Qhiqing Li. I heard you ask about Yun Lu. She is my best friend. We were classmates in middle school. I do not think she will be coming back to work for a long time. Yesterday the police came to her house, the house that belongs to her grandmother, and they to
ok Yun Lu away.”
She looked as if she had been crying, but she tried to hide her embarrassment at revealing such things to a stranger by keeping a smile on her face even as she spoke.
“Yun Lu has a foreign boyfriend and her neighborhood committee found out about it. They tried to persuade her to give him up, they even took away the whole family’s cotton coupons for a year, but Yun Lu is very stubborn. She knew it was dangerous, but she would not give up her friend. Yesterday she was taken away. My father says she will be sent to a reeducation camp in the countryside and there they will try to help her understand how wrong she has been.”
“Can you tell me where Yun Lu’s house is?”
She told me the address and then wrote it out in Chinese and quickly handed me the piece of paper before she moved back to the other end of the counter. She was helping another customer by the time the other salesgirl returned with my purchase. As I walked away I glanced over at Qhiqing Li. She looked my way briefly, no longer smiling, then lowered her head to wait on the customer in front of her.
It took me some time to find the right hutong and when I located the right house and knocked on the low wooden door there was no answer. I was about to turn away when a very old woman with bound feet hobbled around the corner, a young girl of about ten or twelve supporting her, and stopped beside me. The woman’s face was small and deeply lined, her hair, cut short, was white and thinning, and she looked up at me with what I took to be resentment and anger. The girl, too, looked angry, but I addressed her as the one more likely to understand some English.
“I am looking for the house of Yun Lu.”
“This is the house of my grandmother. I am the sister of Yun Lu. She is not at home today.”
The girl lowered her eyes for a moment, but when she looked up at me again the anger was still there.
“What do you want with my sister?”
“I have something to give her. I know she is not at home now and that she may not be home for some time. If I give you the gift for your sister will you be able to get it to her?”
“I do not know.” She seemed more hesitant than angry now, unsure of both my motives and how she should respond.
“If you are allowed to visit your sister, please give this to her. If not, please keep it for her until she comes home.”
The old woman, unable to follow the conversation, had hobbled to the door and was inserting a long key in the lock. I handed the sealed envelope to the girl. She held back for a few seconds, more wary than frightened, and then she took it.
“I will tell Yun Lu that an Englishman brought this for her. Does she know your name?”
“No, but it is not important. She will know where the gift comes from. Dzy-gen.”
The old lady had opened the door and I caught a glimpse of a tiny room and a chipped enamel wash-basin on top of a dark wooden stand.
“Dzy-gen,” the girl said, less wary now, as she put the envelope in one of the front pockets of her trousers and followed the woman inside. The low wooden door was closed slowly and almost noiselessly.
The next day Noah and I gave our presentations while Larry did some sightseeing. Ma felt that he had to stay with us at the conference in case we ran into any language problems, so that evening the three of us insisted on taking him out to the fanciest restaurant in Guilin. We had heard that it also served the best food, but on the plane back to Peking the following morning only Ma could remember how delicious it had been; the three weigwos were so hung over from all the beers and mao-tais downed in the spirit of Chinese-American friendship that they could barely remember what city they’d been in.
Soon after the Guilin trip I met Boaz in one of the masses duck restaurants just off Tien An Men and told him about Yun Lu. He said he’d heard about her arrest and he seemed surprised at my decision to leave the money with the family. I could tell that he would have preferred my bringing the envelope back, given the circumstances, but he never said so directly and I had already decided that I wasn’t particularly interested in his preferences in the matter anyway.