The Habit of Hoping

The evening after graduation ceremony, in 1982, Shuya waited in the shadow of the pagoda by Weiming Lake. The lake was a landmark on Beida campus where she had studied and lived in the past four years. Flushed with the excitement of the afternoon, Shuya was in an expansive mood. The commendations, goodbyes, well-wishes and pledges of alumni loyalty still ringing in her ears, she felt optimistic about life in general, confident in the future — and in the crucial moment ahead. She was expecting Wu Dan, the young man she had been dating for three years, to bring news regarding their marriage.

He was late. But Shuya was used to this tardiness, which she fondly considered one of the lovable flaws that came with being an artist. Dan was a violinist studying composition at the Central Music Conservatory. He had one more year to go before finishing. So, even though they were roughly the same age — Dan was five months younger than Shuya — next year he would remain a student, tugged away in that cocoon of dreamy, gentle fermenting, while she would be out in the real world, working alongside other serious adults, taking real responsibilities on her shoulder.

Pacing absently and staring out at the lightly frozen, metallic silver of the lake, Shuya contemplated this emerging factor of difference between them, and decided that it would not be any problem. They are too close to each other’s heart for this to become a source of tension. Indeed, it will very probably turn out to be an interesting complement: Dan will serve as an extension of their sweet past while she’ll help him prepare for a brave new future he is bound to step into. This way, they’ll continue to stay very close, sharing past and future in their union in the present. The picture enthralled her.

Footsteps roused her from these thoughts, and she turned around to see Dan rounding out from behind the pagoda, walking toward her. He was a tallish young man, with a lanky, slight build that was evident even under the folds of a winter coat. The lines on his face were delicate, sensitive; he was rather too pale to seem healthy, but this, along with a head of uncombed, floppy black hair, gave him the unmistakable air of a bohemian.

As soon as he caught sight of her he lowered his face, and this made her check her first impulse to hurl a cheerful greeting. Walking with hunched shoulders, he did not raise his face until reaching the rock beside which she was standing. When she saw his face her heart went down. The beauty of that face — tender, pure, so dear to her — was now marred by suffering. By eyes puffy and bloodshot. But what really got Shuya was something else. It was the guilty, helpless expression, as a child would look after breaking a beautiful toy, his favorite, without any inkling that this was to happen.

“So,” she started, in as calm a voice as she could muster, “You talked to your parents, and they opposed.”

He nodded, a curl of hair falling limply in his face.

She felt breathless. Deep down she had always known how much, despite his vehement denying when she teased him about it, his parents’ judgment weighed on him. He mocked their opinions on a slew of things — he had enjoyed doing it too much, in her view, out of a childish desire to demonstrate his independence. But when push comes to shove, they could reign him in still. That is, if the stakes were considered too high. Apparently, they had decided that the stakes of a wrong-headed marriage, unlike a love affair, were too high.

“They think we are ill-matched,” Dan said. “They don’t understand it, of course.”

“But what about you?” she asked. “Have you also changed your mind about us?”

“Me? Certainly not!” He protested in startled voice. “My love for you is unchanged and unchangeable. How can you doubt……”

“That’s not what I’m asking, dear,” she broke in quickly, smiling faintly as though to encourage him, while her heart a flutter of hope, confusion, and fear. “What I’m asking is more specific. It is this: are you still certain, very certain, that I am the woman you want to marry, if not now, then later? That I am that person you want to spend the rest of your life with, as you had said before? That at some point we will be the core family, you and I, and our parents will be an extension of this core, whether they like it or not? Are you,” here her voice quivered, but she brought it out. “Are you still absolutely certain of all this?”

He looked at her blankly, frowning a little as though he was trying very hard to grasp the precise meaning of her question. She was demanding him to think carefully now, rather than riding merely on sentimental jumble. For a moment he stood there, blinking. Then it came to him. He was shaken to the core by his own unsuspected doubts, by their implications. And because of his emotional honesty, his habitual trust in her strength, he blurted out.

“No.”

Shuya knew, then and there, that it was over between them.

The state of uncertainty, nevertheless, dragged on for several more weeks. Against her own instincts Shuya succumbed, every time Dan called, to the delusion of a possible turnaround.

Their rendezvous in this final phase were often suffused in a surreally feverish glow, as though a sudden spurt of energy seized them both. One afternoon, alone in his dorm at the Conservatory, they came very close, closer than they ever did before, to bursting through that last gate before total union. In the past it had been Shuya who, gently but firmly, put her foot down. “Let’s save it for our first night, dear,” she would say, kissing him all over his face, “I want it to be perfect.” And Dan, the impatient boy before a loving authority, would sulk a little but grudgingly obey her wish, knowing he would be amply rewarded by other fantastically sweet indulgences. But this time the situation reversed. Despite the same romantic talking, it appeared that Dan’s manly restraint had risen to a new height just when Shuya’s resisting willpower weakened.

“I have too much respect for you to do that now,” he murmured into her disheveled hair.

That line finally woke her up. As though needles suddenly shot out from the soft, rumpled blanket underneath her body, Shuya bolted up, sat in a daze for a moment, then straightened her clothes out. “Goodbye,” she said at the door, without looking at him. He called her name in a choky voice but did not come after her.

Shuya walked home in a chilly wind.

Because of a case of polio she contracted at age three, her left leg was a tiny inch thinner and shorter than the right, and she had a slight limp. This mild handicap had made a subtle, yet profound impact on her. From a very young age she had refused to be treated differently because of her leg. She was active in all physical education classes, and before finishing high school, she insisted on going to the countryside just like all her schoolmates then. Together with the peasants they were supposed to “change heaven and earth,” and Shuya would not allow her leg to rob her of the opportunity to experience that heroic, revolutionary life. That was the height of the Cultural Revolution. Years later, disillusioned and trapped in a poor Shaanxi village, some “sent-down” youths lost their hope of ever returning to Beijing. They married local peasants. To the young peasants who flirted with her Shuya held her head high. Never for a moment did she lose her hope. So, when the Cultural Revolution finally ended and regular higher education was reinstated, she rejoiced. Even though she was already twenty-six, she was among the first batch to pass the exam and got admitted to her top choice university — Beida. And when the gallant, handsome Wu Dan appeared by her side, it seemed that fate, or God, whoever was up there, did gaze fondly upon those who were brave and loyal to their dreams.

Shuya had not imagined an end like this.

Normally she would bike or bus home; having grown up in Beijing she knew all the shortcuts by heart. But that evening she wandered across the city to exhaust herself. The familiar street scenes brushed by: dusty storefronts, grey-tiled houses under poplars, vendors lazily hawking foods, flows of bicycles. Her eyes glided over all these, unseeing, her mind numb. The aching pressure steadily increased in her good leg, but she ignored it.

It was long after dark when she got back to the family apartment near the Foreign Ministry Street. The girl Shuya’s brother had been dating was visiting; laughter came from the brightly lit living room. Shuya could hear her parents chatting to the girl, their voices contented, half-teasing. She made an excuse about a bad headache and went straight to her own room. Almost immediately a wave of drowsiness washed over her. Twenty minutes later, when the mother tiptoed in to check on her daughter, she found Shuya curled up in the oak bed she’d used since childhood, snoring lightly, with all her clothes on.

Next morning Shuya announced that she and Wu Dan had stopped seeing each other. And she let it be known that she would not appreciate any mention of him in the family anymore.

In the next few years Shuya threw herself into work. She had been assigned, upon graduation, to the programming section of a local television station. She walked in with her head full of fantasies: the business of designing fresh programs for millions of viewers seemed to her thrilling and meaningful. But before long she realized how naïve she was.

Learning about television programming turned out to be the easier, and disappointing, part of her job. Here the state issued clear-cut guidelines, and everyone knew, above all, what not to do. The rest, it seemed to Shuya, fell into a rote once you learned the ropes.

Meanwhile, she found the other part of her job, namely how to be a likeable member of a work unit, more tricky and difficult. She liked helping colleagues who were behind on assignments. She didn’t mind working overtime, or running chores, often unrelated to work, for her boss. All in all, she was a competent employee: smart, motivated, fully devoted to work. Yet she had a vague feeling that people viewed her as something of an oddball. At lunch hour, in the dining hall, she often found herself alone or sitting unnoticed at the table while her colleagues joked and gossiped jovially. After more than two years she had not made any friends at work, which was surprising, since she had made friends easily in the past and was loved by her classmates at Beida.

She gathered she was not good company. Perhaps she lacked a sense of humor. Her manner of talking was too straight, too blunt. And while this was all right in an university setting, among the young, it was frowned upon at the work unit. At meetings she would say: “I disagree, because placing this program on the 8pm slot would put our audience to sleep.” Or: “Bonus shouldn’t be equal to all, nor by seniority; it should depend on performance.” Her colleagues would look at one another, incredulous. It was too unsubtle, no way of talking for a mature professional. Yet in her upbringing being “diplomatic” had always been a negative word. Her father, a math teacher, used to tell her that two things were the most important in life: sincerity, and truth. He had these two words written up in a calligraphy scroll and hang on the wall of the children’s room. So, Shuya had trouble reforming herself now. Whenever she tried, she sounded like a complete phony. People seemed embarrassed by it, and she hated doing it.

Gradually she grew passive at work sessions. She offered her opinions less and less, and people seldom solicited them. By now the job itself had become so easy she could do it with eyes half-closed. But she felt lonely.

Though she was always working hard during this period, Shuya did have a number of dates. They were all brief. There was a literary critic, full of high-minded talk and hubris, who disappeared without a word of explanation after their third outing. Then came a barber who sweet-talked to Shuya while cutting her hairs, but he turned out to be married with a kid in the suburbs. The longest of the dates Shuya had at this time, three months in total, was with a young official who worked for the ministry of petroleum. The last time she saw him was from a bus window: he was strolling on the sidewalk and had his arms around another woman’s waist. The young official insisted, over the phone, that the woman was his cousin, but Shuya refused to believe him. The last of these dates was the shortest — only one weekend afternoon. The man was a zoologist and handled monkeys at the Beijing Zoo. Every time he scratched his chin or jerked his neck or darted his eyes, Shuya would cover her mouth and giggle. She couldn’t help thinking of a monkey.

Shuya had once heard of a theory on miscarriage. According to this theory, pregnant women of a certain age who, having suffered a miscarriage once, tend to slide into serial miscarriages. In medical terms this is called “habitual miscarriage.” Shuya suspected this was happening to her relationships with men.

One afternoon, not long after the monkey man fiasco, a Beida roommate who kept in touch dropped by Shuya’s office. The woman hadn’t been popular in the Beida years, neither with professors nor with male students. But recently she got married and now talked about men with an air of authority. While chatting the roommate mentioned a recently widowed newspaper editor who worked in the same government complex with her. She was enthusiastic, describing the man as decent, mature, and quite senior in ranking. If Shuya was interested, she could make an introduction. Shuya thanked her friend but declined. She was in a pessimistic mood. Why start another relationship that’s bound to fail? And she didn’t want to embarrass her friend.

“Don’t be so picky,” her friend warned before leaving Shuya’s office. “You’ll only get disappointed if you hope too much.”

Shuya thought: Then why get married?

That summer Shuya’s brother got married. The wedding party was held in an imitation Western style, very much in vogue then. Shupeng was five years younger than Shuya; his bride three years younger than him. A houseful of their friends showed up, all seemed exceedingly young to Shuya. They ate the potato salad and ice cream with gusto, cheered while the small band played “Bollero” and “Friendship Forever.”

Shuya’s father got drunk. Neglecting his wife’s tugging, he stood up and told the guests that he’d like to sing a favorite song of his for this happy occasion. In a hoary, toneless voice, wrung with real emotion, the retired math teacher sang “Moscow Nights.” Shuya, listening to the familiar melody and gazing at her gray-haired father, felt a clutch in her throat.

The young guests, touched by nostalgia, clapped enthusiastically, urging the old man on. Shuya’s father boasted: “Name any song from the fifties, Soviet or Russian folk, I can sing them all.”

“Ah, let’s hear ‘Katyusha’!” someone cried.

“And ‘Troika’!” yelled another.

Then someone remembered: “Hey, we need an accordion for this!”

But the bandleader, a short, balding man in a red shirt, turned his palms up: “Sorry, we’re just a string and wind ensemble.”

Suddenly Shuya’s father said: “My daughter! She can play all these songs! Shuya, bring out your accordion and show them!”

All eyes fell on Shuya. “No, papa, the accordion is broken,” Shuya shook her hand hurriedly, an awkward smile playing on her lips. “I haven’t played it for years.”

There was a disappointed look in everyone’s eyes, but in no time the merry party resumed, the little episode forgotten. A few young guests, though, stole curious glances at Shuya. So that’s the bridegroom’s sister, they thought to themselves. Quite pretty really, but with an air of the dreamer. And apparently getting to be an old maid. They then looked at the cherubic-cheeked, laughing brother with shrewd, practical eyes, and wondered how different siblings could end up.

That night, alone in her room, Shuya sat before the mirror for a long time. Though strangers often took her for someone younger, she was soon to turn thirty-three. People misjudged her age mainly because of a girlish, innocent quality about her face. Her skin was still smooth and taut; her petit figure, the graceful waist and the sloppy shoulders, were unchanged. She knew how to dress. Unless one really paid attention, her limp was hardly noticeable. There is no need to feel low and to lose hope, Shuya told herself, the important thing is to stay true to your heart.

But her heart was gnawed by loneliness. On the evenings Shupeng and his wife came to the family apartment for dinner, Shuya would try to find excuses to stay late in the office and then, if it was still too early, she’d take a walk through Ritan Park on the way home. But it seemed she was stumbling into couples squeezing their hands at every bench or necking in the shadow of every pavilion, and the sight made her feel lonelier than ever. At night it sometimes took her hours to fall asleep, and when she did she slept poorly. One night, she had a dream about Wu Dan, whom she hadn’t thought about for a long time. In the dream he was complaining to her about his miserable marriage — his wife was apparently a shrew, but just when she opened her mouth to comfort him, Dan made a cruel remark about Shuya’s appearance: how much she’s aged and how she had a “maternal love” for him.

The next day Shuya called her Beida roommate. At first the roommate thought her friend was sick, but smiled knowingly when Shuya asked whether that editor of hers, the widower, was still around.

“I’ll see that you meet him this Sunday,” the roommate promised.

Kang Ding wasn’t like any of the men Shuya had dated. He wasn’t like any of the men she had fancied about, either. Square shouldered, stocky, he was a man of medium height and few words. When he talked his features didn’t become very animated, like Dan. He was good-looking, Shuya concluded, but in a bland, unnoticeable sort of way.

“Call me Old Kang,” he held out his hand to Shuya, as if they were embarking on a committee meeting rather than a date. His handshake was at once strong and careful, and Shuya felt the delicateness of her own fingers inside its warm calloused embrace. “They all call me Old Kang,” he added. There seemed a shade of apology in the way he said this. Kang Ding was fifty. Their age gap had been another reason for Shuya’s hesitance.

It was a beautiful autumn day. The sky was clear, blue, and very high. On her proposal he walked her to Ritan Park, bought her a sugar glazed hawthorn popsicle on the way and, for the most part, listened to her talking. She was surprised how much she talked: she had never been so “chatty,” she thought, on a first outing. At the sight of the first empty bench after getting into the park Old Kang suggested that they take a rest.

Shuya arched her eyebrows: “Are you tired already?”

There was the briefest pause. He said: “Yes, a little.”

“Well, all right then,” she shrugged, while he bent over brushing the fallen leaves off the bench. Again, she pondered their difference in age. Or, maybe this is his way of getting more “romantic”? Only later it came to her, though he never dropped a hint about it, that he was concerned about her leg.

To her questions about his life, he made modest, short replies. A very ordinary man he was, from a poor family up north in Harbin; a party member; had a diploma from a Liaoning military school; had worked at the same work unit for many, many years. About his marriage he was laconic as well. Shuya gathered that it wasn’t a happy one: the wife had been sick for years before being hit by a bus, and they had no children.

He geared the conversation back to her, and she was conscious of, while launching into a lively account of some episode of her life, his interested gaze on her. She hadn’t felt so attractive in a long time. He did not try to hold her hands or touch her arms. But Shuya was content, just sitting there with him on the green bench, breathing in the fresh, crisp fall air, listening to the occasional pigeons’ whistle in the sky, watching other couples and families strolling by. For the first time since she said goodbye to Dan, Shuya felt a genuine lightness of heart.

The following Sunday they met again, then the one after that. And when the Sunday outings became regular, Old Kang began calling her on Wednesday evenings, and they would dine together, always at the same little restaurant he liked near the Drum Tower. In his opinion no other place in the city made as good a bowl of hand pulled noodles as this one.

“And how many restaurants have you been to in Beijing?” She would challenge him.

He’d grin good-humoredly, slurping noodles instead of answering. But if she insisted, he would tap his chopsticks on the edge of the large, steaming bowl and say: “You don’t have to try everything to know what you want.”

“But Old Kang, that’s different from saying what’s the best!”

He shrugged. “For me, the best is recognizing a good thing when you see it, and stick to it.”

But his logic was flawed, she clapped her hands, arguing on, his conclusion therefore questionable. He listened to her, not saying yes or no, only smiling fondly. Yet next Wednesday rolled by and he again took her to the same noodle place, a half-guilty grin on his face, mumbling: “Of course, if you really don’t like it……” She had not the heart to deny him such a small, modest pleasure after he had deferred to her wish on everything else.

Gradually, however, it occurred to her that he had this same attitude toward all the other things they did together. She was always the one to propose a new place to go on Sundays, a different agenda, a novel idea. She had been curious about a food festival, a book fair, a new commodity show in town. Old Kang would always come along, moving beside her and smiling fondly. But whenever she left it to him, he’d say: “Well, how about a walk in Ritan Park?” This, she realized, had been his favorite way of spending a Sunday with her. He had “recognized” this on their first walk, and had been simply humoring her other whims while desiring nothing but this.

Oddly enough, the insight tipped her balance. So far, she had felt very much the superior little girl: the younger, better educated, more vivacious part of their relationship. Now she saw that she was in the presence of a gentle, clear-eyed, tenacious and steadfast character. Unlike her, he knows exactly what he wants, he doesn’t demand or search for more. A bit narrowly focused perhaps, but such a man doesn’t quit his commitments easily, for he is capable of deep, absolute loyalty. Shuya was impressed.

Once again she asked him about his previous marriage, for she suddenly felt a sting of jealousy. Had that woman been the love of his life — love onto death, like in the novels? Would she, the newcomer, be battling her shadow, his pain at losing her, the memory of their past? He would obviously stick to her if she hadn’t died in an accident. Insecurity pierced Shuya’s heart. I’m the handicapped one, she thought gloomily.

That was when he spoke, for the first time in some detail, about his wife’s illness. Wenfang had suffered a shock at age thirteen from witnessing a “peasant struggle rally;” her father, a landlord, got beaten up so badly he had to be carried home. For days afterward she refused to get out of her nightgown or leave home. She danced on the bed and on the dining table, whimpering nonsense. But after a period of treatment, she recovered. Kang Ding didn’t know any of this when they met. But soon after their marriage, in the sixties, while the Cultural Revolution raged in her work unit, she had a relapse. She never came out of it again.

So for nearly twenty years he lived with and took care of this paranoid, hallucinating, periodically suicidal woman who was his wife, and accepted it as his fate. There was a time when he felt so unbearably lonesome he would plead to Wenfang to give him a child, a son to keep him company. But his desire frightened her: her childlike dependency on him was so complete the idea of another child in the house scared the hell out of her. In her more lucid moments, Wenfang would sob, saying that she didn’t want to bring a baby into this world so full of misery, and that the baby may inherit her mental illness anyway. So he gave up the idea of having a child, accepted it as his fate. He was resigned to a life of barrenness. Then one day a call came to his office from the police. He was informed of a traffic accident: his wife had somehow gotten out of the locked apartment and dashed out before a bus. His last look at Wenfang was at the mortuary. Her chest was crushed flat, an arm was severed, but the neck and the face were left without the slightest trace of injury. Her eyes were closed, like a baby in a deep, sweet sleep. He had never seen her looking so peaceful in her life.

Shuya wept. Then she embraced Old Kang. She was deeply moved, and felt embarrassed by her foolish jealousy. The two of them remained in each other’s arms for a long time, paying a kind of silent homage to the specter of this other woman. Shuya understood now that she owed it to Wenfang for what she had with Old Kang. For in her heart there was no doubt that Wenfang decided to release him from the clutches of a cruel fate, to let him have a new life with a woman he could cherish. And in the end, the only gift she had to repay Old Kang’s generosity was her own life. Again, tears streamed down Shuya’s cheeks.

“Marry me,” Old Kang asked her. His shirtfront was crumpled and wet; his hand, touching her tousled, bristly hair buried in his chest, was trembling.

“All right,” she replied. Her heart ached with elation.

A month later they had a small, quiet wedding, and afterward Shuya brought her trunk of clothes to Old Kang’s two-room flat. The flat was safety prove. The sharp corners of the wood furniture had been blunted, the door to the balcony had a lock, so did the kitchen drawer containing knives and matches. There was even a lockable switch for the gas. Old Kang had lived here for many years with Wenfang, and it was from here that she escaped to die, just two streets down from the building.

They would have liked to start over in a new home, but that was impossible at the present. The hope lay in the future: when they have a child, they might qualify for a bigger apartment. Old Kang joked: “Maybe we won’t like to move then. This place is all set up for a kid to run around.”

Their first night was not what Shuya had imagined. The sharp shooting pain was so unbearable she stopped him and ran to the bathroom, sitting on the pot for a long while. After that they were both more scared than eager, and sweat beaded Old Kang’s tense, lined face. Just when, finally, her pain began to ease off, he suddenly started wheezing. He had very bad asthma in his childhood, this he had told her, but it had been many years since he had a relapse, and in general his health was quite fine. Now the combination of the wedding night pressure, her nervousness, the stuffy, dusty air in the room, the labor……all at once his breath coarsened, as if someone was pulling bellows in his chest. The sound grew so alarming they had to break off the act before finishing. Shuya turned the lights back on and made them both some tea.

“I’m fine, believe me,” he assured her after a spell. “It’s just I haven’t done this for so long I’m a bit out of practice.” But his hair stuck damply on his scalp, and in his wheat-colored robes he looked shamefaced, breathless and, Shuya thought for the first time, pathetically old.

I have saved myself up for too long, she reflected with sudden bitterness and self-pity. This man I have married could almost be my father.

But neither her pain nor his asthma returned after that night. Slowly the awkwardness faded, and as their bodies adjusted to each other, the lovemaking improved. Now it was quite pleasant to come home from a day’s work, to ease into the evening’s shared domesticity, a simply prepared dinner, some reading or chatting and then, if they weren’t too tired, the calm, tender intimacy in bed.

It was not the stormy passion she had dreamed of in her youth. There was no submission with abandon, no soaring of the soul, no ethereal joy and agony that’s supposed to make you feel like a fairy, like you want to die. More than once, afterwards, while Old Kang slept Shuya propped her elbow up on the pillow and watched him. She saw a man in perfect contentment, all his features composed and relaxed, without a trace of suspicion that something might be lacking or amiss in life. He was in a deep sleep, snoring lightly and evenly, a few untrimmed black hairs flapping in his nostril. And the sight of this satisfied, masculine grown man lying beside her suddenly filled her with a sad feeling of loss. With a twist of anguish Dan’s face returned before her eyes: an androgynous, young face, so full of quivering, childlike pleading. Their erotic wars had been made more intense by a never realized anticipation. An intense anticipation she could now only look back on in nostalgia.

But Shuya told herself that it was a phase everyone had to outgrow. She’s got a mature, loyal husband now. This was real marriage, real life. She’s got to live it with her two feet on the ground.

Around that time, it so happened, that she got busier at work. A liberal wind was blowing in the air, and the atmosphere at the TV station loosened up. All around her people debated politics and culture, with a daring quite inconceivable even a few years back. The most unlikely proposals were weighed seriously. For instance, to be a more modern people, should Chinese try to give up naps, Mao-suits, and chopsticks? Outrageous? Flippant? Well, Hu Yaobang has just suggested it in a speech. Hu was a reformist firebrand, no question about that; but he was also the present General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Shuya was involved in producing a new program called “A Window to the World.” The planning sessions were exciting. A Chinese-American woman was to be invited to host the show: she was to work closely with the Beijing colleagues, and together they were to bring a series of fresh topics to the local audience. The highlights included American culture and social customs, an episode on jazz, and the sixties. The show was to be a breakthrough in both format and content.

In due time the Chinese-American hostess, Wendy Hsiao, arrived from San Francesco and checked into the Great Wall Hotel. She was here to iron out details in the proposed program. After that it would be submitted to the higher up authorities for approval.

Wendy Hsiao was an eye-opener. The first morning she stepped out of her taxi and into the TV station’s gray, dank, concrete building, instant news waves rippled across offices and studios. It was not just the stiff, dramatic, jet-black coiffure, the white powdered face, the blood red lipsticks, the gold high-heels. It was also the way she walked and talked. Wendy wasn’t a tall woman — she was probably a couple of inches shorter than Shuya — yet in her beige, body-hugging power suit she walked like a powerhouse, and spoke like she hadn’t gotten a minute to waste. Wendy was a true professional, and she wasn’t used to suffering fools.

Shuya couldn’t stop talking about Wendy in the evenings. The woman shocked, revealed. “You know what Wendy said at the meeting today?” Shuya told Old Kang while they were having dinner. “She said: ‘I’m an anchor. I don’t just read out the lines that are written down for me. I help create them.’ Imagine that, Secretary Guan was in the room!”

Old Kang picked up a wedge of fermented bean curd and put it into his mouth.

“Isn’t she something?” Shuya wondered aloud. “I thought I was too straight. But Wendy……”

A little cold sniff came out of Old Kang’s throat. “Wendy. Listen to the name. She’s no Chinese.”

Shuya said: “But she is! One hundred percent Chinese blood. Her parents immigrated from Guangdong.”

Old Kang said nothing.

The next evening Shuya brought home a brochure with a colored picture of Wendy. “See for yourself, isn’t she Chinese?” She stuck the picture under Old Kang’s nose. “I think she’s beautiful too.”

Old Kang took one look and turned his face away. He walked to the kitchen with a scowl as though he had accidentally swallowed something mildly poisonous.

“What?” Shuya followed him incredulously. “You don’t’ think she’s attractive?”

“Not my type.”

“What type is she, in your opinion?”

“Ah,” he shrugged, “the old witch type.”

“What?” Shuya couldn’t believe her ears. “You think she’s old? She’s only about forty.”

“Well, she made herself look like an old witch with all that makeup and heavy jewelry.”

Shuya laughed. But later, when she considered this again, she thought perhaps Old Kang had a point. There was a degree of overkill in her fashion style. Shuya, who also liked good clothes and occasionally cut and sewed simple things herself, would not choose that style. Still, she found Wendy fascinating and admired her spunk. Again, she remembered Old Kang’s remark about the name “Wendy,” and it occurred to her that she, too, had a foreign name. It came from The Story of Zhuoya and Shula, a Soviet novel translated into Chinese, about two brave, heroic siblings, very popular in China in her childhood. So when it was time for her to start elementary school her parents combined the names of the two young heroes and registered it as her formal name. “We hoped you’d be doubly heroic,” Shuya’s father used to tell her, only half in jest. And Shuya would think to herself: “I’ll need it with my leg.”

Wendy Hsiao’s presence, for two weeks, stirred things up at the old TV station. Her energy was contagious. Shuya looked forward to going to work now, to watching this half-alien, theatrically decked-out woman who whirled across the dark corridors, smiling, gesticulating, ignoring the gazing and frowning daily cast upon her. At work sessions Wendy tilted her head this way or that way like a decorated, high-strung bird, listening to everyone, but she spoke her mind always.

She seemed to have taken a special liking in Shuya. She urged Shuya to make comments, took her points seriously, debated and argued with her. Shuya felt flattered, appreciated. In the evenings she came home looking tired, wide-eyed, and high. She was restless like someone who had just woken up from a long hibernation. And despite the late hours, she often wanted to make love. “Com’on, I sleep better afterwards,” she coaxed, eyes twinkling. It made Old Kang vaguely uneasy, for in his wife’s passion he sensed an alien fire. It struck him to be something overwrought and unseemly.

One evening, as they lingered behind others, Wendy asked Shuya if she would join her for dinner; she’d take Shuya out to “wherever you think is the best place in Beijing.” Shuya thought of Old Kang, and declined. Wendy saw the regret in Shuya’s eyes. “Don’t’ worry, dear,” she patted Shuya on the shoulder like a big sister. “Maybe another day. Or you could just come to my hotel for a drink. We’ll get together.”

But they never did. The work schedule got increasingly hectic toward the end. There was a wrangling over issues having to do with “the Chinese versus American perspectives,” which had always been the wrangling point, but got so serious this time that both Wendy and Secretary Guan stormed out of the conference room and stomped down the hallways, in opposite directions. Two days later Wendy left. The details she had flown all the way in to help iron out remained in a dubious, wrinkled state. Her visit clarified the differences between the two collaborating sides, and that, to a certain extent, increased their understanding. But the program failed to coalesce into a mutually acceptable whole. Some negotiation and patchwork were done by transatlantic cable and calls, and the thing was finally submitted to the higher-up leaders for a review. Months later, when the “anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign” got underway, the proposal, virtually forgotten, was still waiting on a back shelf somewhere, pending approval.

At first Shuya thought her moodiness and sluggishness had to do with Wendy Hsiao’s departure. It had been a month now; going to work wasn’t nearly as much fun as those two whirlwind weeks. But why the poor appetite, the occasional dizziness? One morning, she threw up all the breakfast she had just forced herself to eat. Old Kang, who was also getting ready to go to work, watched, thoughtfully, her retching over the sink and finally asked: “When was your last period, Shuya?”

She was pregnant.

Is it a boy, or a girl? This quickly became the refrain in their evening conversation. Shuya shrugged and said either would be fine with her, though her heart secretly craved for a girl, a girl she could make dainty little clothes for, a girl she could, always, cuddle and chat with and confide in, girl’s way. But she did not say this out-loud, because she knew that Old Kang, with all his heart and soul, longed for a son. He was the only child of an illiterate countrywoman who, having quickly lost her husband to the Sino-Japanese war and her chance to bear more children with him, never married again. This young widow with bound feet did everything she could — wash, sew, wet-nurse, cook — in whatever household that would pay for her service, to raise her son. All the while with the firm belief that the boy would grow up, marry, and carry on the line. Her pride was strong and totally focused on one thing and one thing only. That someday there would be a grandson, and all her hardship, her sacrifice, would have been worth it.

The fact her son was shackled to an insane, barren marriage for life must have been unbearable. The widow, having weathered so much and been cheated out of her reward by this cruel, ugly turn of fate, died in a heart attack. Sturdy, basically healthy and not even out of her sixties, she was gone in a matter of minutes. Blind to the next twist down the fateful road, she gave up. It was less than a year before Wenfang’s exit.

Shuya understood how Old Kang must feel about the whole business. The old-fashioned preference for a son was there, but there was more to it than that. Old Kang had not talked about his mother in any detail, but Shuya could hear it in his tone. Even in her absence, a grandson would be a triumph, a cathartic relief for him, of the deep guilt, all those years, of not being able to satisfy his mother’s wish and make her proud. It would be the best offering to such a mother. With a grandson kicking and thrashing in this world, her ghost would not be bitter and sour in the other.

“A boy would be fine with me,” said Shuya again one night, looking at Old Kang whose eyes were wistfully cast on her belly. It was beginning to show a very slight curve.

At the TV station, the scene had been undergoing a major turn-around.

As soon as the “anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign” started, the station leaders had a sudden flash of memory about the proposed show a Chinese-American woman was to host. This whole fancy idea that had irked some of them all along but could at best only be ignored under the liberal wind, was finally useful in proving a point. “A Window to the World,” even in its compromised, half-baked proposal stage, turned out to be ripe material for the campaign, a perfect target to attack.

Shuya, along with all who worked actively on the show, was criticized. The fact that she had been an easy, willing prey to Wendy Hsiao’s corrupting influence was sarcastically noted. She was a small fry. Some of her superiors suffered more. Despite his wrangles with Wendy, Secretary Guan was now viewed as a vacillating liberal, too soft! So along with another section chief, he got a real shelling from their hardline rivals who, loading up their cannon with fresh campaign fodder, were conveniently settling old personal scores. Sweat on his brow, Guan read out pages of soul-probing “self-criticism” to a room crowded with gloating faces. He got demoted anyway. The scene was eerily reminiscent of the old days which, only yesterday, people began to consider a thing of the past.

Earlier on, Deng Xiaoping had famously explained his open-door policy to a visiting foreign dignitary with a metaphor: If you open the window to let in fresh air, it is inevitable a few flies will get in. The message then was that China wouldn’t shut the window on account of a few flies. Now it appeared that too many flies, like Wendy Hsiao, had taken advantage of a wide-open window and droned their way in, polluting the green sky of China in a very irritable way. The intellectuals were all getting starry-eyed about the West, the journals talked incessantly about reform, some students even started demonstrating on campuses. Cheeky! A cleansing was in order and someone had to take the blame for allowing things to come this far. Just in case anyone was in doubt about who really had the final say in China, Hu Yaobang was swept off, in the blinking of an eye, from his post. Zhao Ziyang, the premier who had so far kept himself busy mainly in the economic area, was appointed the new General Secretary.

Wendy Hsiao, of course, would never be invited back. Shuya was first sorry about Wendy’s departing, then about how quickly people appeared to forget her. Now she was outraged by the charges heaped on Wendy’s so-called fake-foreign-devil bourgeois style. Wendy suffered more abuses because she looked so Chinese yet acted so American. This was even less forgivable than true white skinned devils.

One Sunday, when they were taking one of their walks in Ritan Park, Shuya confided to Old Kang: “You know, it feels empty to go to the station now. Everything is so dull there. Like an old donkey circling around the same millstone.”

Old Kang, who had recently put on some weight and walked with an air of complacency and tranquility more pronounced than in the past, gave his wife a sidelong look. Nearly six months into her pregnancy now, Shuya had more of a shuffle in her gait. But her morning sickness had long been over, and her complexion was fine. There was a radiance to her whole person which, unbeknown to her, made her look younger than ever.

For a while Old Kang said nothing, but when he regarded her again the expression in his eyes was a mixture of curiosity, incredulity, even a degree of unwitting admiration. “You know, Shuya,” he suddenly grinned. “You’ve got a habit of hoping.”

“A habit of hoping? What does that mean?” Surprised and puzzled by the odd phrase, Shuya frowned.

Old Kan sighed. “It’s typical of your generation. You were baby-fed on these high ideals. You revolted against the bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution, hoping communism would be realized overnight. Then you went down to the countryside and saw life, real life, which flipped all your ideals on their heads and beat you down for a while. But then you came back to the big cities, the top universities, and guess what, old habit die hard and before long you are hoping again.” He paused here, shaking his head softly, but a hint of sarcasm, almost anger, seeped into his voice as he brought his uncharacteristic little speech to the finish. “Yes, Shuya, hope is the high drug your generation’s addicted to. Life isn’t worth living unless you transform it.”

Shuya was speechless. Somewhere during this conversation they had both stopped walking, and now they were standing face to face in a narrow, dark little bend of the pebbled path cutting through a stretch of tall pines. It was the first time since she met him, Shuya thought, that Old Kang was truly disturbed about something. The hostile sting in his eyes probed a soft spot in her, and she could not bear it.

It lasted but a few seconds. Before Shuya could say anything, Old Kang had put an arm around her and steered her along the path. A pavilion overlooking a green pond loomed ahead. “Let’s sit down over there and look at the ducks. It’s so pretty around here this time of the year.” His voice was light, solicitous. “Of course, it’s not just your generation — why did I say that? Wenfang was the same way. She’d lapse into these fantasies about a beautiful, perfect life, and I wouldn’t know what to make of it all — I mean, you don’t know whether her head is all there or not. Fond of fairy tales, that woman was. Well, time for a break.”

The subject of his mad, dead first wife had not been brought up since their first married days. Shuya smiled weakly, wobbling along besides her firm-handed husband. Her belly weighed so heavily on her legs that the good leg was hurting her, while the bad one went soft and jiggly as if it was a loose sack of beans.

The phrase, the habit of hoping, blazed a trail into Shuya’s consciousness. It’s true, she thought with a shudder. Her mother, a long time ago, had said something similar. The girl was a dreamer like her dad, she used to tell their relatives, always hankering after the impossible. One of the favorite books in her adolescent years was a biography of Rosa Luxemburg, the feisty, undefeatable Hungarian revolutionary. An entry in her diary went: “I want to be like Rosa when I grow up.” She was then aged 13, under-nourished, bone skinny, a chit of a girl barely climbed out of the maw of a great famine which had just gobbled up roughly thirty million people in the country. Years later, as one of the send-down youths, she witnessed — immersed in it — poverty, ignorance, and desperation in a little backwater village in Shanxxi. For eight long years, the flowering years of their youth, these city kids were stuck there, inside that dried up wrinkle of the yellow earth. Two girls, from the same high school as Shuya’s, were raped, half-willingly, in order to get out. But Shuya’s faith in leaving the place, in a different, better future, however remote, did not shake. Every evening she’d rub or soak her feet in warm water, with herbs if she could get them. Every night, by a rickety little lamp with a newspaper shed, she’d go over the old schoolbooks that she’d brought from Beijing. The body might be weak, but the spirit, or the habit, had held strong. When they finally reinstated the entrance exam for universities, Shuya had long been ready. She wasn’t one of those who prayed at Buddha’s feet only on the eve of the battle, as the saying went.

That was then. Hoping was the birthright of children, the luxury of youth. In her late thirties now, can she still afford such a habit? If it was at all charming earlier on, it must be at her age foolish, maybe irritating, to people. She could even see it in Old Kang’s eyes. And he was one of the most tolerant, generous men she had ever met. Doting on her, really; spoiling her as a kid, sometimes. All at once Shuya felt ashamed. How could she have been so blind? I got caught up with all those highfalutin ideas and projects while ignoring my own husband completely. And she blushed at the recollection of her dissatisfaction with him as a lover. She was the one, apparently, who had her head in the clouds. And he, quietly accepting the way things came down on him — asthma, a deranged wife, then a dreamer wife. She is bearing his child now.

Humbled by this embarrassment, this new sense of guilt, Shuya made brave efforts of improving herself. If not a housewife, then at least she’d be a better wife in the house, and a conscientious prospective mother. Never good at cooking, she now prepared more elaborate dishes, aided by cookbooks and recipes her mother had packed into her wedding trunk, untouched till now. Old Kang, made a competent cook by his years of taking care of Wenfang, was relegated to helper’s duties in the kitchen. But making clothes had always been Shuya’s hobby; so now, before Old Kang’s admiring eyes, a vest, or pajamas for him, cleverly made from scratch, would take shape. She made a whole stack of charming little things for the baby.

She was getting very heavy now, swollen ankles, dark green bulging veins. She ate like a little pig. Cooking, or doing anything standing, was becoming too much of a strain. But she never ceased to busy herself with some thing or other. Every evening, she would sit against the bedroll in the large bed like a lopsided mother hen, bits of sewing on her lap, and Old Kang, all awkward happiness, would hover nearby, reading a paper or watching the TV, never letting his wife out of his sight. The little apartment had never been so merry and peaceful. The air was full of expectancy.

Then one cold wintry morning the baby was born. A boy. Tears sailed down Old Kang’s creased cheeks in teams when he took into his hands, gingerly, the tiny screaming kicking creature with a purple face and a large waddling head. In the next six months or so life for both parents, but particularly for Shuya, revolved around the newborn. On leave from her job, she acted as if she had never worked at the station nor was expected to return there some day — in six months exactly. She nursed the boy night and day — to everyone’s surprise, Shuya was full of milk and seemed in ecstasy at feeding time. Every little thing was fussed over. Is the room too cold? Too hot? Should the cloth-diaper be ironed, or just pressed? Why is that rash on his neck not going away? Why is he burping so much? He hasn’t made pooh-pooh the whole day, good heavens!

While the baby was dressed and swaddled like a fancy toy on display, the mother had degenerated, it seemed immediately, into slovenly matronhood. Somedays Shuya hardly bothered to change out of her house-robe or comb her hair. She paid no attention to herself, little to Old Kang. Her mother, who visited to lend a helping hand, was shocked by her daughter’s transformation and found it a little odd the absurd amount of time Shuya spent just looking at the baby. And more than once, while granny did some washing or cleaning in the kitchen, she overheard her daughter talking to the baby, and it was this incessant, dreamlike stream of monologue over a million things, from average maternal nonsense about the “cute cute dumpling feet” to serious, great schemes of a future, when the baby would, of course, grow into this full length man living this incredibly valiant life. At moments like that, it struck the old woman that, amid all the stress, fatigue and thrills of new motherhood, Shuya might have lost some of her sanity.

This state of things might go on longer if it had not been for an abrupt, unexpected turn. It occurred one breezy summer afternoon. Shuya and her mother were watching the baby, who had just begun to crawl, dragging his fat little legs and hands on squares of rubber mats Shuya laid out on the living room floor.

“How strong his legs are!” Shuya was telling her mother loudly — she was obsessively proud of her son’s two healthy legs — when the door opened and Old Kang came in, carrying a shabby black leather bag under his arm. It was rather early for him to come home from work. But ignoring this, Shuya immediately wanted to enlist her husband’s enthusiasm on the baby’s new advance in growth.

“Look, Old Kang, the little guy is crawling so well already!”

But the moment Shuya saw Old Kang’s face, she sensed, even in her befuddled mental state, that he had something far more important on his mind. “What happened?” She inquired, alarmed.

Without a word Old Kang sat down by the dining table, opened his black bag, solemnly pulled out a letter from it and handed it to his wife.

Shuya read it in one breath. “Pyongyang!” she gasped, looking up at Old Kang. “They are sending you to Korea?” She read the letter slowly over again; it confirmed the news.

Xinhua News Agency assigned Old Kang to be its senior correspondent to Pyongyang. He was to undergo three months language training, starting immediately, and report to station at completion. Spouse is allowed to accompany him, but no children. The term would last four years.

“No!” Shuya exclaimed, twenty minutes into the excited, chaotic discussion over the new situation. “But how can I leave Taotao behind? He’ll be less than a year old!”

As if on cue the baby, so far contently playing with a ring-shaped toy on the floor, dropped the toy and started howling, his face reddened and crumbled up, his chubby arms stretched out to his mother. But before Shuya went over, with a swift swing of arms Granny had picked up the boy and cradled him in her bosom. She rocked and cooed to the boy until he quieted down.

“You leave the boy to me,” Shuya’s mother said firmly. “Didn’t you always want to go abroad, to see the world? Now is the chance.”

“But mom, we are not talking about New York or Paris. We’re talking about Pyongyang!”

“Doesn’t matter,” the old woman said, unflinching. “It’s still going abroad. And it’s maybe the only chance. Go. Your husband needs a companion living in a foreign country. You take care of him; I take care of Taotao.”

Five months have passed since Old Kang and Shuya arrived in Pyongyang.

In the beginning, time went by quickly because everything seemed new. The foreign arrivals, following the protocol, were bused around Pyongyang for the purpose of admiring all the major urban monuments, the pride of socialist Korea. Every day there was a tour, to see a giant government plaza, a giant railway station, a giant sculptured statue, or a power plant on the outskirt with a giant chimney. Shuya and Old Kang, along with seven others, craned their necks at these giants, nodded at their young Korean guide’s detailed, mechanical introduction, dutifully posed before each one of the monuments for photographs. But what they were really impressed by were Pyongyang’s clean, orderly avenues — even better than Beijing’s, in Old Kang’s opinion.

There were also official banquets to attend, which the spouses were invited along. Shuya sat stiffly in her freshly made, navy blue suit and skirt, smiled politely, tried and marveled at the tiny chili peppers that exploded on her tongue. There was hardly time to collect her thoughts.

She started to learn Korean. As soon as she decided to come to Pyongyang, she had gone to a bookstore and bought a textbook of beginner’s Korean, but her son so filled her days (and nights) that she had had not the time to open it once. Now, of course, she could really give it a shot: she had always wanted to learn a foreign language anyway. So, even though their guide’s Chinese was excellent, Shuya always tried to speak a few Korean phrases to him on their tours. She would like to try it on some of the other locals too. Often, when their bus drove through the streets, or as they were led through a public area, the Korean passers-by, adults as well as children, would wave and smile at them. And the Chinese would wave and smile back. But Shuya soon realized that none of the Koreans intended to come near or talk to them. They were foreigners. And all the foreigners in Pyongyang, including the Chinese whose government was Korea’s number one friend and benefactor, understood that strolling around town and striking up conversation with the locals would not be welcome behavior. The circumstance was no surprise to anyone; in some ways it reminded Shuya of Beijing just ten or fifteen years ago. Experiencing it now, on the reverse side, was nevertheless frustrating. And it would grow steadily more depressing for her.

Old Kang did not mind it nearly as much. For one thing, he had a full workload. There was a regular stream of reports filing, news drafting, wire sending. There were regular work meetings, documentation sessions, official delegates hosting. There were trips to plants, farm collectives, state ceremonies. Nothing was frantic, but he always had something to do and was thus kept busy.

Shuya was not. Like the wives of other journalists and diplomats, she was assigned some work inside the compound of the Chinese Embassy, where they were all lodged in the guesthouse section. Since the chief purpose of the work, mostly office chores, was to help the spouses kill some of the idle time on their hands, nobody took it seriously. Everyone drank tea, read newspapers, gossiped, bantered, knit, spit, lunched at the Embassy dining hall. It was like any government work unit back home.

Sometimes, on non-working days, Old Kang and Shuya would take a walk through the area outside the embassy. All the streets were spotlessly clean, but they seemed so lifeless to Shuya, since they could not communicate with anybody beyond the invisible, impermeable wall of polite greeting, let alone making friends. Nor were the foreigners allowed to shop in local grocery stores — they were strictly for Koreans. A few times, without telling Old Kang, Shuya had ventured into them out of curiosity. Almost at once she understood why the authorities wanted to keep these places off limits to foreigners: so under-stocked were these wretched “stores” the shelves were nearly empty! One idle afternoon Shuya skulked into a store that had nothing but rows of glass bottles containing some kind of reddish liquid. Upon careful reflection Shuya decided it was a sort of diluted soft drink — sweetened water with red dye?

Thus time glided by. One lazy spring morning, while sitting in the office, Shuya glanced up at the calendar on the wall and realized that it has been exactly six months since they arrived in Pyongyang. April 19, 1989. The thought instantly depressed her. For by now she knew she did not like Pyongyang. She did not like North Korea. And she didn’t like the confined, dull, meaningless life within the wall of an embassy. She had given up studying Korean; lately she had stopped going out at all. What for?

Why have I come here? She asked herself now. For this false, lifeless foreign “adventure” I left my son, the real life that came out of my own body and needed every day of my care and attention.

She had been surprised, and felt guilty, that she did not miss her son nearly as much as she had anticipated. At first any thought of him would make her heart flutter, or if she happened to catch his voice in the background when she made her weekly call home — it was agreed that it would be the best if the mother didn’t speak to the boy on the phone so the pain of separation would not be prolonged. But as the news of the boy’s having adjusted at Granny’s and getting on happily became steady, Shuya relaxed. The phone calls became biweekly. Sometimes, days went by without a single thought of her son entering her head. But now, guilt, which had been lurching in the back of her mind for some time, pierced her soul.

That evening Old Kang had a long work meeting and came home late. He found the two-room suite pitch-black and his wife in bed. Carefully switching on the small table lamp, he could tell immediately that she wasn’t asleep: her stiff back indicated foul mood, frustration, unhappiness. A yellow covered photo album, filled with snapshots of Taotao’s baby stages, lay open on the desk. The room smelled stuffy; there wasn’t a trace of contentment or peace anywhere. Old Kang sighed. In a way, he understood her unhappiness and sympathized. He knew she was way overqualified for the office chores here and suffered, like any mother would, from such a long separation from a young child. But his understanding and sympathy were passive. What was to be done? Nothing, under the circumstances. Duty to the Party and to your country comes above all else. And after all, they weren’t the only ones in this kind of dilemma.

Especially tonight, these thoughts were only making a perfunctory, cursory passage through his head, for it was still full of the news he had just received at the meeting.

“Are you awake?” He asked gently.

Shuya’s stiff back did not stir.

“Maybe tomorrow then,” he shrugged, sitting down by the edge of the bed. “It’s just some news from Beijing.”

The word “Beijing” touched a nerve string. Shuya asked, without turning: “What is it?”

Old Kang bent over to untie his shoes. “Oh, looks like some college kids are out to make trouble again. A few thousands demonstrated in Tiananmen Square today.”

Shuya turned around and sat up. “Really? To mourn Hu Yaobang?”

The abrupt death, in a heart attack, of the disgraced reformist leader had reached them all two days ago.

“I suppose so,” replied Old Kang, moving to sit next to his wife in the bed. He looked thoughtful. “But there was a sit-in in front of Zhongnanhai, and terms were demanded from the Party on Tiananmen Square, things like that. Obviously, some people are taking advantage of the mourning to stir things up.”

“What sort of demands have they made?” insisted Shuya, ignoring her husband’s damning tone.

“Oh, that Hu Yaobang’s career be reevaluated, also the campaign against bourgeois liberalization two years ago, and to disclose high party leaders’ financial accounts to the public, open up media, nonsense like that. You’ll hear it all soon enough.”

“So the non-party members will be briefed too?”

“Yes, either tomorrow or the day after. They want everyone to be vigilant.”

“Vigilant?” Shuya repeated. Suddenly a note of mockery and bitterness entered her voice. “What’s the use of being vigilant here? Against what? This is a desert. Worse than that: you can’t even stir up sand here. It’s all just a clean nothingness! Oh — why did I come here?” She moaned and threw herself back down in bed.

That night Old Kang made some efforts, valiantly but in vain, to get his wife interested in lovemaking. And since she was quite tired and wasn’t really interested, he fell asleep easily, having made the gesture. Shuya lay in the dark for a long time, thinking guilty, inconsolable thoughts about her son. Only briefly, before falling asleep, she thought again about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and wondered if the students would continue.

Dawn was hazy in Pyongyang on June fourth. Outside the Chinese embassy, the early summer sun was rising, dyeing the sky with the immense expanse of a blood orange hue. Inside the embassy, people crowded into the large conference room with the large television set that carried CNN. The air, filled with pungent smoke, spit, fart, sweat, curse, and the staleness of a sleepless night, was so thick it was suffocating. As if suddenly startled out of a shocked daze, a middle-aged man — one of the political attachés — went over to the heavy drawn curtains and pushed a window open. A waft of morning air floated into the room.

Shuya sat on the first row of the chairs. There she had been, as though nailed to it, for five hours. There was a disheveled, wild look about her. Having waken up around 1:30 AM by a colleague’s phone call, she had bolted out of bed and rushed over to the TV room without combing or washing or waiting for Old Kang, who had found time not only to get dressed but also to make a phone call to the secretary of his party branch and to make himself a large jar of tea, which he had been holding in his hands and having re-fills by pouring fresh hot water from one of the thermoses in the room.

The massacre in Beijing is done. Tiananmen Square has been cleared. The tanks are rolling on Changan Avenue. The city looks deserted, abandoned, eerily quiet. Hours later, in the afternoon, a rain will fall, putting out residual flames on blackened charred bodies of armored vehicles, washing the blood stain away from flattened bicycles and roadblocks. And then it will keep on falling, like great cold merciful splashes of tears from the sky, onto the ancient capital of China.

The small Chinese community in Pyongyang — diplomats, journalists, staffers, wives, cooks and cleaners — had watched it all take place before their eyes on the screen. Like foreigners all over the world, and unlike the vast majority of the 1.2 billion Chinese, their own fellow countrymen, they have witnessed history. The tragedy of their own race.

Later that evening, back in the two-room suite, Shuya and Old Kang had the first — and the worst — serious fight of their marriage.

At first it was in muffled low voices. Nobody should hear them; Old Kang absolutely insisted in this.

“So, let me get this clear,” Shuya was saying — she was whispering loudly in a breathless tone, “Even after this, this, this bloodshed, you still think the government is doing the right thing?” She was pacing the living room in small, swift, uneven steps. Her limp had gotten more pronounced — no doubt due to the fatigue and the excited state she was in. She had slept a bit earlier on — about an hour — again at Old Kang’s insistence, but had been so tormented by fantastic horrible blurry images of death and mutilation that she had groaned and woke up in a damp sweat. Her face had turned so pale and ghastly, and horror so diminished and darkened the light in her eyes that even her husband did not try to urge her back to sleep.

Sitting in the chair by the dining table, Old Kang remained silent. He, too, looked tired. The flabbiness of his face and body contrasted with the nervous tension unwittingly revealed by his clenched hands and his eyes, which anxiously followed his wife’s every movement.

“Speak up, you!” Shuya demanded, still in that loud whisper. She stopped right in front of him, glaring down at his face from inches away.

Old Kang’s jaw moved, painfully, in an attempt to formulate an answer, yet words failed to come. “I think,” he finally gasped, “it’s maybe……still early to judge……”

She jumped off from him as though stung by some searing flash. “Still early? Still early! You want more butchery, more deaths? Heavens, how can you……” she broke off in disbelief, throwing up her thin arms.

“You misunderstood me,” he said, lamely. But the urgency to expurgate himself in her eyes loosened his tongue. “I only mean that it’s a very complicated and dangerous situation out there. Some bad people are trying to overthrow the government and turn China into chaos, and it’s been going on for a month and a half now, and they just won’t stop unless you take tough measures……”

“Unless you kill, kill, kill!” Shuya’s voice rose sharply, and disregarding Old Kang’s gesticulation she went on: “Yes, roll out the tanks and kill your own people who have no power, no arms, nothing! Nothing whatsoever but hopes to make their own country a better place! Vain hopes! Oh, this really kills me.” All at once she choked. Staggering back, she rubbed her chest with a balled-up fist.

Old Kang stood up, walked a step toward her with the intention of helping her to a chair, but the sight of hot, raging tears streaking down her cheeks somehow halted him in his track. Frowning, he plopped back down into his chair instead.

They were both silent for a long while. The room darkened a shade, though the sky outside was still full of summer light. Wiping off tears with the back of her fist, Shuya began to pace the room again, slowly this time.

And slowly Old Kang brought out with difficulty a conciliatory line: “The students had good intensions, in the beginning at least. But they are young and naïve. They demanded too much, so impatient. A small band of black hands could manipulate them easily. They are good kids, these youngsters, but they just don’t understand Chinese reality because they have this, this……” He searched for the words. It was on his lips to say “idealism,” but it didn’t seem right: idealism, even in the Party culture he was steeped in, is a correct, positive quality, not something to be condemned or even criticized.

Shuya said, quietly but clearly: “You mean they have this habit of hoping.”

For a moment Old Kang didn’t recognize the phrase but it struck him as quite right, as just the phrase he was groping for. “That’s it,” he echoed, lighting up. “That’s what they all have: a habit of hoping.” But this repetition of the phrase brought to him a strange feeling of familiarity, and he looked, bewilderedly, at his wife.

She had stopped pacing. Now, standing facing him squarely and with her back to the window, she was a small, compact dark figure carved against a large background of crimson sunset sky, and all at once a high-pitched, piercing roar of laughter issued out of her.

The room shook and reverberated. Old Kang stared, in stunned blankness. Shuya was laughing a hard, uncontrollable, wild laugh. Her mouth was wide open, her jaw trembled, her body swayed, and long strands of black hair, some of it caked by tears, were falling and dancing all over her shoulders and face. She was laughing away, her body and soul all going into it. The sound, sharp, hoarse, shameless, animal-like, gave Old Kang goose bumps allover. In a moment Shuya doubled over because of the hurt the laugh was causing in the stomach, yet she went right on laughing despite the convulsed pain. She was seized by it and simply could not stop. Finally she collapsed on the floor, in a trembling heap, and her broken, half choked laugh was subsiding into an exhausted whimper. She looked plain mad and a little pathetic, like someone in a seizure.

Old Kang finally understood what was striking him as so strangely familiar. He was having an epiphany of sorts, a slow, blurry déjà vu. It sharpened into focus when Shuya collapsed onto the floor, half laughing, half wailing. For at that instant he saw, with absolute clarity, the ghost of his first wife silently, discreetly, descending from the thin crimson air. With a sigh, she entered Shuya’s body and took her away.

Taotao was growing up into a handsome boy. Nearly ten, he had dark, round, glistening eyes, a lanky little body that breathed restless energy, and quick, lithe movements of a young animal that was all natural, unconscious grace. At school, any scheme of fun or prank would find him at the very center of it; like a magnet his mischievous charm drew boys and girls alike. Even the teachers who, of course, frowned at the boy’s uncontainable personality and tendency toward various forms of delinquency, found him irresistibly likable. The boy had a wild streak, yet he was still moldable material, in their view. Over the years the same reports had been coming home, with passable grades, and an evaluation of his intelligence: the boy lacks nothing in smartness, only a will to exercise it in the right direction.

These reports always disturbed Shuya. Every time such a report reached home there would be a scene. Taotao, with trembling hands, would fish it out of his school bag and submit it to his mother, as a thief might turn in a piece of evidence of his crime to the authority, and wait for the terrible punishment to fall on his bowed, guilty head. And it would fall, like an inevitable storm, with his mother’s pointing finger, angry tirade, followed by her despairing wails and then his tearful apologies, at which point mother and son would fall into an embrace and sob themselves back into a bittersweet reconciliation full of a melancholy wistfulness. Both would feel chastened by it.

Despite the awful intensity of this scene, there seemed to be a tacit understanding between the two of them that this was the best, perhaps the only, way of handling it. For the boy never showed these reports when his father was around. Would the old man be more tyrannical or more lenient? It didn’t seem to matter to the boy. He had respect, as respect was prescribed for such relations, for his father. But emotionally, the two stood in mutual aloofness. Despite all the symbolic significance a son represented in Old Kang’s view of life, he was awkward with the kid, did not know how to play with him, or how to talk to him except delivering a lecture. And the boy responded to this the way he did to the teachers: he pretended to be receiving the message while his soul fled, escaping into some pleasure hunt or dreamy clouds where no one could find him. Essentially, what mattered to the boy was his mother. Her love, her intimacy, her opinion of him, was the central thing in his life.

It was a hot, stuffy late summer afternoon. In the morning a rainstorm had been forecasted. All day long great lumps of gray clouds moved in the sky, but until now not a single drop of rain had descended yet.

This whole week Shuya and Taotao had been alone at home. Old Kang had been away on a holiday trip to Mt. Changbai, not expected to return for a few more days. The trip was arranged by the Xinhua News Agency for its retired senior cadres. Since it was close to the Korean border, Old Kang was especially keen on going, for he harbored — though this was never said — fond memories of his years of station in Pyongyang.

Coming home from school at five and found himself alone, Taotao had put down his school bag and strode straight to his little study desk.

On the plywood desk stood a dilapidated computer, an old dos-386 model, which was carefully covered up with a strip of green velvet to prevent it from the dusty Beijing air. The computer was the most valuable item in the entire cramped three-room apartment, and Shuya had insisted on purchasing it for Taotao despite Old Kang’s disapproval: he considered it an unnecessary, costly nuisance. Now, as if imposing some sort of self-punishment, Taotao turned on the old junk, willed himself to concentrate, and began swiftly typing lines on the screen. But every now and then he would suddenly throw up his hands, jumping up and, mumbling loudly something even he did not quite understand, he’d run across the room as though in despair.

In his school bag lay the worst report he had received to date: he flunked one course, dangled dangerously on the borderline for two others, and the teacher’s remarks had lost their previous qualifiers and kindness. Recently Taotao had been skipping classes for day trips to swim in the canal on the city’s outskirts. He had gotten hooked to kung fu novels. He had befriended a group of construction laborers in the neighborhood and, teased by them, he had even smoked a few times. The disastrous results of the exams were only to be expected.

The boy’s heart trembled in fright when he glanced at the little clock squatting on the desk. Almost six o’clock. His mother would be home any time now. No longer able to carry on the empty gesture of studying — he was hoping this might soften his mother’s wrath a bit — he now paced the small apartment anxiously. And it was toward the bedroom, where he slept with his mother in a double bed, that Taotao tossed the most rueful of glances. Will she punish me by leaving me alone in that bed tonight? Will she — and at this thought his body went cold — never sleep with me again?

Many years ago, in 1991, when Shuya finally got the permission to return to Beijing ahead of her husband, she had found her son turned into a near stranger. Taotao, then a scrawny boy of three and a half, hid himself behind a tall dresser in granny’s home and refused to come out to meet his mother. Repeatedly assured by granny that the woman seated next to a large box of presents was indeed his own mama, Taotao finally edged out and walked toward Shuya, all blushing timidity.

“Go, go to your mama!” urged granny, and turning to Shuya she assured her as well, seeing her disappointed, guilty face: “It’s all right. He’s just a bit shy. All week he’s been pestering me with questions about you. My ears have grown calluses! He was going mad waiting……”

But before the end of granny’s words, mother and son were already in each other’s arms, and in a moment all three of them were crying loudly, clutching together into a human ball.

That evening Shuya took her son home. Their old flat, having been locked up for over two years, had a musty smell. Like a little shadow Taotao followed his mom everywhere while she cleaned up the rooms. And when the time came for sleeping, there was no question where the kid wanted to be. As soon as Shuya spread the double quilt over the double bed, Taotao slipped into it like a lithe little snake. Then, shrouded in the dark, breathing the warmth of each other’s body, mother and son kissed, caressed, crooned and chatted both serious things and nonsense for a long while, before finally falling asleep.

They have been sleeping in the same bed ever since.

But recently something else about his mom had been troubling Taotao. About six months ago, Shuya had persuaded her husband to take out a small portion of their savings to buy a stock. A lot of her colleagues at the TV station were playing the stock market, which had been all the frenzy in recent years. The newspapers were filled with stories of those who had the vision and guts to invest and were rewarded with huge fortunes almost overnight. Old Kang, in his more relaxed passivity, let his wife take charge — he never had much of a head for figures or financing anyway. So Shuya ran the operation alone; the stock she bought, according to reliable information, was one of the fastest rising stars. Neither Old Kang nor Taotao knew much of the details, but Taotao could feel as their shares increased his mom also got increasingly nervous. Often, she seemed distracted, sometimes she mumbled figures while cooking or cleaning. He knew this had something to do with the stock’s ups and downs. But lately the news must be bad because his mom began to suffer insomnia and was quick-tempered. Taotao did not know what to do: he felt anxious, but not knowing exactly what’s going on, it made him less inclined to hang around home. So, while the mother drifted away from the son into this other adult world — the world of stocks and risks — the boy also drifted away into his world. He spent more and more time with his pals on the streets.

Even the sweetness of their nights together had been marred. Over the years their bodies had become so well-tuned, so intimate with one another, that each depended on the other for the blessed peace. Nowadays the mother’s insomnia tormented the son’s dreams. It made him feel helpless. And he could still not imagine sleeping without his mom.

About two years after Shuya left, Old Kang finally completed his station in Pyongyang. He came home to find not only his son unrecognizable — Taotao was shooting up, a hyperactive little urchin — but his wife a changed woman. The memory of those traumatic months after the Tiananmen massacre still haunted him. He had witnessed, helplessly, a neurotic streak in his wife that grew into a case of full paranoia. Periodically this would erupt into a hysteric fit. She had suspected, variously, that there was a general conspiracy to block her from ever getting back to her son, that she was followed by strange men in Pyongyang, that their meals and drinking water were poisoned, and so on. The worst fit, oddly, was over a suspicion of him: she thought he was a spy.

“Are you an informant for the ministry of security?” she had asked him one morning upon waking up, her eyes narrowly and fiercely trained on his face in an effort to penetrate the darkest recess of his soul. “Tell me honestly, comrade Old Kang, if you still care for me at all: have they sent you to Korea to spy? Is that why they wouldn’t allow Taotao to join us?” Her eyes glinted with an eerie, shrewd knowingness. “Taotao is the best hostage, isn’t it? The only child, a son.”

Life back in Beijing appeared to have affected Shuya differently. From their correspondence, which had been regular and business-like, Old Kang had sensed the hardships Shuya was suffering single-parenting a small child in Beijing. During the day she had her job at the TV station, full-time with a long bus commute. Evenings and weekends, she had Taotao on her hands. One winter, upon receiving the news that Shuya had fainted and gotten sick after a particular trying trip changing gas cylinders for the kitchen, Old Kang suggested that Shuya should put Taotao into a weeklong kindergarten, to save her energy from daily pickups. But Shuya wouldn’t hear of it. “Taotao has had too much separation already,” was her simple reply. And that was that.

It was to a much-aged woman that Old Kang returned to. Shuya’s hair once had a lush gloss, now it looked dry. Gone was the naive youthfulness that had marked her face; her features now settled into more rigid lines, dull and lusterless. She moved around listlessly, sometimes like a sleepwalker. The change so shocked Old Kang in the first days he avoided eye-contact with his wife for fear of revealing his true feelings. But Shuya didn’t seem to notice or care.

They seldom made love now, since Taotao went on sleeping in the double bed with his mom, while Old Kang took the single bed in the other room. Somehow he could not bring himself to demand a change of this arrangement. So it went on, even after his work unit finally assigned him a three room flat and they moved. On those occasional Sundays when Taotao visited granny by himself, and the apartment seemed infinitely quieter and emptier, Old Kang would try to make love to his wife. But here another change, a new trait of hers, was discovered. Shuya would yield, but her body had become so passive, so flat and unresponsive to his ministrations, it frequently gave Old Kang the feeling that he was holding a dead person in his arms. Once, while he was hanging on top and she lying perfectly still, her limbs spread out limply and her face turned to the side, her eyes closed, he had a sudden vision of her as a giant dead bird. He was making love to a giant dead bird!

Yet, not knowing why, he did not dare protest. He pretended not to notice. But all of this made him feel vaguely ashamed, though he could not explain why this was so. He had never been a very virile man, and now that he was getting to be sixty and near retirement, it was not difficult for him to be resigned to approaching celibacy and a quieter pace of things. Sighing, he felt a faint tinge of self-pity, but also relief. A few years ago it had been nerve-racking, unbearable, living with his half-deranged wife on foreign soil. He had dreaded a gradual slide of her to full dementia, which would mean that in his old age he would have another unstable woman on his hands. What had he done in his former life to deserve such a fate? To be punished not just once, but twice? So it was not without a sense of gratitude that he took in his wife’s new metamorphosis. Of course, he couldn’t say he liked it, but at least she was much calmer, more stable. Old Kang was certainly for calmness, and stability was always a good thing. Thus comforting himself, he made peace with this new state of his married life.

One area where Shuya was not calm had to do with their son: here, Old Kang could still catch a glimpse of the high-strung, passionate woman he had wedded years ago. But this did not disturb him too much. He had known this through his own mother, who had been a formidable presence throughout his youth. The maternal instinct, it seemed to him, always brings out the most powerful portion of a woman’s character. Infinite strength must be stored into a mother on account of her offspring. An ancient thing this is.

In the spring of 1996, Shuya received a call from an old Beida classmate named Yuan Hui. He had gone to the United States soon after graduation, went on to obtain two graduate school degrees, served as an analyst in a major investment bank in New York for a period, and now worked for a non-profit organization that funded education in developing countries. Asia, naturally, was his special charge. On a business visit to Beijing, he remembered Shuya and thought it would be nice to have a drink and catch up after so many years.

This was what he told Shuya on the phone. The truth, they both knew, was a bit more complicated. During the Beida years Hui had had a serious crush on Shuya and had left China with bitter, unrequited love in his heart. Now married with a son of his own, and a flourishing career in America, naturally he’d like to find out how the woman he had loved in his youth was faring. Maybe he wants to flaunt his happiness and success, thought Shuya, to show me what I have missed out on. This suspicion initially made her hesitant, until she heard that his son and Taotao were exactly the same age, and the way he spoke of his boy, devoid of any pretension, showed genuine sentiment. In fact, there was a tone of anxiety, a wistfulness of a father who put perhaps too much stock in the son. It touched something very deep in Shuya.

They ended up having coffee in Jinglun Hotel and talked for three hours straight. Afterwards, it occurred to Shuya that this was the most intense communication she has held with an adult in years. Hui turned out be a different man: not the strident, vain smart-ass Shuya recalled from the Beida years, but a gentle, reflective, serious person. They talked about a great many things: after all, there were nearly fifteen years, two life stories, to be exchanged. Afterward, two things stood out in Shuya’s mind.

One was what Hui described as “the turning point” in his life. About six years ago, he was diagnosed with a severe eye disease, went nearly blind, lost his Wall Street job, and lapsed into depression. But during this crisis he met a Christian minister whose compassionate, wise company greatly comforted him. The minister prayed for his recovery and persuaded him to pray regularly. A year later Hui came out of his illness fully recovered and has been a practicing Christian ever since. “I saw light again,” Hui told Shuya, “and it was the most beautiful experience I have ever had.” She thought she saw both fervor and serenity in his eyes. It made a deep impression on her.

The other thing that kept coming back to Shuya had to do with Hui’s son. “I’m a dinosaur in his eyes,” Yuan had confessed with a rueful, self-deprecating laugh. “It’s true. All these years I’ve lived in America, deep-down I’m still so Chinese, and I don’t feel I can ever get out of the past completely. Whereas my son, ah, he’s a different breed.”

Shuya had brought a photo of Taotao. Hui had studied the photo with care and said: “He’s got your spirit.” Then he had pulled out a pen from his breast pocket, a silver-tipped old Parker, and handed it to Shuya. “I didn’t prepare a present. Please give this to your son. Look, our generation, we’re the afternoon sun now. The future belongs to our kids. So, best of luck. May he be blessed.”

This meeting with Hui, without Shuya’s quite realizing it, was like a stone tossed into a still pond. Throughout the eighties China had waves of “going abroad” craze, especially in the big cities. Though she had fantasized about it idly, Shuya had never seriously pondered leaving the country herself. Starting a new life in a foreign country, to be a student, or a waitress? Surely she was too old for that. She had a husband, a child to take care of. And the Pyongyang experience so destroyed any residual romantic illusion of foreign adventure that even idle fancies ceased to visit her. But here, out of the blue, came forth Hui, who seemed to Shuya a transformed person, and his son, “a different breed,” in his words. Afterward, every time Shuya looked at her own son, a young shooting bud, all unconscious grace and vitality and innocence, a sadness, a dark terror, would seize her. For deep down she knew, as clearly as she knew the night would follow the day, that the boy was fated to repeat a cycle. It was something that he was born into, a trap that none of the people she knew had been able to escape. Apart from Hui.

The dreaded moment finally arrived. The boy, slumped in the chair before the computer desk like a cub in a trap, heard of the sound of key turning. Breathing deeply, he looked up with doomed resignation. The door opened, and in came his mother.

Even in his nervous state the boy noticed, almost at once, that something unusual must have happened to his mother. Shuya lumbered in with a heavy limp, threw her son a blank glance, and without a word went straight to the bedroom.

Instantly the boy forgot his own guilt. “Mama, what happened?” he jumped up and asked eagerly, trailing after her.

She was already lying down on the double bed. Her face, ghastly pale, was drained of all energy. She gave him a faint smile: “Mama doesn’t feel too well. I’ll just lie down here for a bit. Then I’ll make us dinner.”

“But I’m not at all hungry,” said the boy gallantly, though his belly had been grumbling for the last hour. He hovered around her like a little pet. “You rest, Mama. I can cook up something for us. We’ve got some dumplings in the freezer; I know how to boil them.”

Shuya shook her head. “No, don’t go. I’m not hungry either.” Lifting a thin arm she touched his tousled, coarse black hair lightly. “Sit here, son, keep Mama company for a while.”

With a nimble little thrust of his legs the boy kicked off his shoes and hopped lithely onto the bed. In a second he was sitting cross-legged beside his mother. “Want a leg rub, Mama?” He inquired softly.

She nodded and closed her eyes. And for the next fifteen minutes or so neither of them spoke. The boy, his fingers moving deftly and gently, massage her tired, listless, aging legs. The ritual, familiar and long cherished over the years, brought them both such intimacy and comfort that a feeling of normalcy settle in the air. The room stood in silence, except for the tiny hissing of skin friction, his breathing, and her occasional involuntary sigh of pain and pleasure.

When he finished, she lied there motionless for a moment. Then she stirred in a way that indicated not merely satisfaction, but a desire to talk. The boy sensed this — he knew all her body movements well. All at once the report lying in his schoolbag crept into his consciousness and his guilt rushed back.

“Mama, I’m very sorry,” he blurted out, blood draining out of his handsome young face in the dusk glow.

Her eyes fixed on him in alarm. “What happened?” she asked, sitting up.

The boy trembled. “I……today, I got……” he swallowed with difficulty and could not go on.

Her face was stern, but when she spoke her tone was not angry but sad. “Is it another bad report?”

The boy nodded.

“Is it very bad?”

“Yes,” the boy murmured, moving to get off the bed to bring the report.

But she grabbed his arm. “Don’t’ go yet, son. Mama has some very bad news to tell you too.”

Now it was the boy’s turn to look alarmed. Legs dangling over the edge of the big bed, waiting anxiously, he gazed into her face.

Her chest heaved as she drew in a deep breath, and the ghastly pallor seeped back to her face. Unwittingly, a picture of someone drowning into water flitted across the boy’s mind, and he felt his heart sinking with a terrible foreboding.

“There has been a big stock market crash — a series of crashes, really — and I missed the chance to get out. All our savings are caught in it. I don’t think we’ll ever get it back.”

Taotao’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t know whether he was so surprised by this information, but it was a shock, and he simply did not know how to respond.

“Ah — ” Shuya let out a wail, and suddenly she held out both hands to her son as though in a plea: “I’m so very sorry. It’s all my fault. I thought, I was hoping to get lucky and make enough money to pay for your future education. I was foolish, mad really……”

“What do you mean, Mama? My future education?”

“Yes,” Shuya said, a fire flashing up in her eyes, and words gushing out of a suddenly lifted floodgate. “I had a plan for you. I wanted to send you abroad, Taotao, to go to the university in America! Some of my colleagues are making the same plans. As long as we’ve got money we can do that, you see? Some new rich people have sent their kids off already. And that’s the only chance for a boy like you! You’ve been getting all these bad reports, and I just didn’t see how you were going to pass the exams for college here, with all this terrible competition. You are smart, Taotao, but you have a wild spirit, too wild for a Chinese, and I’m afraid you may become another……”

Here she suddenly stopped, as if the very mention of it might in some ways help turn her fear into reality. “Ah but now I’ve ruined it. I blew our chance. And you, you’ve got another bad report!” Her mouth twisted in an ugly twitch. She looked like someone on the verge of hysteria.

Terrified, remorseful for his own deed and pitying his mother, the boy burst into tears and threw himself into his mother’s open arms.

Outside, the rain finally came. In no time at all the splatter became a downpour, turning the window into a wet blur and darkening the room. It was unclear how much time passed, perhaps just a few minutes, perhaps much longer, but finally the boy stopped crying and raised his head from her bosom.

The expression on his face was so solemn, so deeply serious, it gave him a look far more mature than his age. “Mama, I want to make a pledge to you. You remember this and kill me if I break it. I’m going to change. I’m going to become a good student, a top one in my school. I will not skip another class, not a single one. From now on I’ll read and study hard, and I’ll get into a university, whether it’s here in Beijing or abroad. I’ll get scholarships to go to the best schools in the world. And I’ll become someone you will be proud of. Mama, believe me!” he was almost shouting now, his face burning. “This will happen. It will, one day, just believe!”

Shuya listened and stared at her son. There was a wild, almost ecstatic expression on her face — the ghastly pallor had vanished, now it shone in radiance. In her son’s burning, young eyes she saw something that tightened her throat. It was hope, writ large. And what is the boy hoping for? For success and wealth? For love and dignity? For her confidence in him, in his ability to break out of this invisible, choking cycle of defeat? For hope to overcome despair?

It did not matter. For whatever it was, she knew, for certain, as clearly as if the angels had declared it from above, that the boy had inherited from her the disease for which there was no cure. He had gotten the habit of hoping. It was in his blood.

Slowly, without thinking, she sank down to her knees and covered her face with both hands. For the first time in her life, she prayed.

The boy stood unmoving, for a moment, in a trance. Then, bewildered and uncomprehending, yet compelled by a force he did not resist, he dropped down to his knees, and prayed with her.