Читать книгу Parishioners and Other Stories - Joseph Dylan - Страница 4

Throughout the week, gray clouds gathered and the rain fell. Falling as a mist on Monday, the rain returned as a drizzle the following day. The rain today tore down in sheets, peppering the sodden streets, flooding the shallow depressions in the asphalt, the rainwater only slowly slipping away down the storm drains that were about to overflow. Taking care that they would not get their feet too wet, reluctant pedestrians tentatively leapt across the rain swollen gutters, All that summer, the weather in Shanghai had been the same: a day or two of sunshine, followed by three to four days of rain. Endless humidity; near endless precipitation. No less than anyone in the city, Zhang Heng was weary of it. From the third floor windows of the International Medical Centre, the private clinic where she worked as a registered nurse, she could see the pedestrians below scampering past in the downpour. They made their way up and down the crowded boulevard underneath their umbrellas looking like lilly pads skimming across a pond. For Zhang Heng, it was sea of humanity, a sea of underlying problems and poverty and misfortune. This was the China she was desperate to leave; this was the China she was desperate to put far, far behind her. For many of the Chinese, it was a time of change, a time of hopefulness, a time of bounty; but for her the future only seemed forlorn.

Of the six nurses who worked full time in the International Medical Center in the Pudong District of Shanghai, Zhang Heng was the only one who was not married. Of the six nurses, she was the only one who hadn’t really settled down and started a family. At twenty-eight, only Li Li was younger than Zhang Heng. Li Li was fresh out of nursing school with no experience overseas like the rest of the nurses at the International Medical Centre. Traditionally, by the time they were in their mid-twenties, most Chinese women were married. Most Chinese women were married and most of them had had the one child the government allowed them under the One-Child Policy. As desperate as she was to get out of China, Zhang Heng was only slightly less desperate to get married, to get married and have a child. Women not much older than her already considered themselves middle-aged spinsters if they had not yet found a husband. So far, for Zhang Heng, marriage just had not been in the cards. It was neither her personality nor her looks. Warm, but more than a little wary of people, Zhang Heng was a woman who seldom quarreled or found fault with anyone. Nor did they easily find fault with her. Her large, luminous, dark eyes, which she highlighted with thick eyeliner, peered out shamelessly above sculpted cheekbones on a face with a flawless, pale complexion. Up until two months ago, she was seeing an engineer. That had lasted over a year. Suddenly, without much explanation, he returned to the woman he had been seeing before he became involved with Zhang Heng. Before him, she there had been a graduate student in history at Peking University whom she expected to marry. That, too, came to an abrupt end that she never fully understood. Following both break-ups, she spent a day or two at home. She stayed in her pajamas and crawled into bed. Pulling up the down comforter over her head, she silently wept until the tears would no longer come. Once they ceased to flow, she never cried over either one of them again. What was over was over. If her colleagues suspected that her personal relationships had run aground on the shoals of life, they would not suspect it from her demeanor, for she kept up with her work as she always had: cheerfully, efficiently, competently.

More than having a husband, more than having a family, Zhang Heng wanted out of the Middle Kingdom. For Zhang Heng, there was no true freedom in China. There was no true promise of happiness, no way to truly be herself. That she had no husband was perhaps fortunate for Zhang Heng, for one would have only tied her down to her homeland. Just where and when she decided on joining the diaspora of China, she didn’t know. Nor did she know how abruptly she had come to the decision. She just knew she did. She wanted this no less than a caged dog wanted out of the confinement of its pen. If she were to reflect upon it, she believed she had nursed this desire ever since she was a girl growing up in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, the westernmost province in China. Born in a small village in Hebei Province in eastern China, her family was physically uprooted during the Cultural Revolution. For a Chinese family at this time, it was not an unusual predicament. Ninety percent of the Chinese who lived in China were Han Chinese. In an attempt to dilute out the minorities that inhabited the hinterlands, the government deported many of the Han Chinese living in the interior to the outlying provinces. One day, when Zhang Heng was a girl no more than five years of age, her father, Zhang Bo, received a notice from the government social bureau informing him that his family was to be resettled in Xinjiang Province. Xinjiang, in the northwest corner of China, was clear across the country from Hebei. With the notice came no specific destination. The People’s Party of the Republic of China just ordered Zhang Bo and his family to report to the social services department in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province within two weeks. There, he and his family would be informed as to where they were to move. With the note, came passes for the entire family for the train to Urumqi.

Clutching her favorite rag doll in her left hand, as she held her father’s hand in her right, she remembered boarding the dusty, rancid, ancient train that paralleled the Silk Road as it headed west for Xinjiang Province. The railcar was full of similar families being expelled from the heartland of China. Every so often, she remembered her father taking out the letter from the resettlement board and glancing at it as though he hoped he had somehow misread it, somehow there’d been a mistake. Lacking a berth on the train, she nodded off and on in the crook of her father’s arm, as they sat on the foam bench covered in torn, shabby, black vinyl, while the train slowly inched its way across northern China. In front of them, on a similar railcar bench, sat her mother and her older sister, Hui. After a couple of days of circumnavigating the northern stretches of Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province, the train entered the vast arid, rippling plains of Xinjiang Province. Eventually, they arrived in Urumqi. After the train spat them out into the railway terminal, Zhang Heng and her family spent the night in restless sleep on the worn, wooden benches of the lobby of the Social Services Bureau for Xinjiang Province. There, the following day, an official, a middle-aged bureaucrat wearing metal-rimmed glasses that slouched down on his blunt, narrow nose, and a single, white hair protruding from the mole on his bald pate, informed her father that the family was to be resettled on a collective farm outside the city of Kashgar, the western terminus of the Silk Road in China. The official handed her father a document with his chop on it.

There was no more to be said in the matter. It was all official. The chop made it so.

In Kashgar, still clutching the doll in her hand, the family, with their precious few belongings tucked into a couple of pieces of weathered leather luggage, was transferred to a large, blue, flatbed truck. Sitting on their luggage in the back of the truck, they made their way to the collective farm with two other Han Chinese families from Hebei Province that had met a the same fate as her own. The collective farm was an hour outside Kashgar, down a rutted, gravel road. The memory of the jarring truck ride, along with the train journey, were among the memories that stuck with her of the Cultural Revolution. More than these memories, she recalled the few occasions during the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guard confronted her father as he returned from the fields. Making up some excuse or other, they pummeled him, kicking and striking him till he was prostrate on the ground, his nose and mouth bleeding from their blows. The first time, her mother tried to intervene. Members of the Red Guard, no older than teenagers, spat upon her mother and shoved her to the ground. The attacks of the Red Guard were quick, vicious, efficient, and thoroughly humiliating. They were equally as baffling, coming from no undue neglect of the rules or any intransigence on her father’s or her family’s part. But little during the Cultural Revolution little made sense. It made no sense to her parents, their coworkers on the farm, or to the multitudes of the Chinese wherever they lived. It didn’t have to. It just was.

On the collective farm, the seasons came and went by slowly for Heng and her sister, Hui. The summers on the desert could be blazingly hot, heat waves shimmering above the brown and red parched earth; the winters bitterly cold with the cold breath of frigid, Siberian winds seeping through the chinks of the clapboard walls of the modest dormitory where the Party housed her family. While her parents toiled in the fields of wheat and hay and barley, she and her sister attended class in the one large room of the collective farm in the same brick building as the cafeteria. Too young to work alongside their parents, the children of the collective farm were taught to speak and write Mandarin, taught to calculate mathematical problems, taught geography, while at the same time being inculcated into the correct way of political thinking. During the Cultural Revolution, no one was too young not to be imbued with the teachings of the Great Leader.

Then, like a slowly receding tide retreating from the shingle, the Cultural Revolution withdrew. It withdrew and never came back. Having imploded upon itself, the Red Guard, whose sole existence was to carry out the policies of the Cultural Revolution, disbanded. Life returned to some sense of normalcy for her family and the millions of Chinese who had endured the years of turmoil and upheaval. Following its demise, her father petitioned and received permission from the local Party leader of the collective farm to leave if he so desired. For months, her father looked for work elsewhere. Finally, finding a job in a factory that manufactured farming implements in Kashgar, Zhang Bo moved his family to Kashgar where they found a small two-bedroom apartment in the ancient part of the city. Unable to find more gainful employment, her mother took in laundry and labored as a seamstress. In winter sitting by the stove, and in summer sitting by the open door to catch a refreshing breeze, her mother sewed with her needle and thread under the dim light of a sixty watt bulb that dangled from the ceiling. There, in the dim light, her mother slowly stitched together the dresses and blouses for the neighborhood women, who often paid her in live chickens or freshly-laid eggs.

With her father employed at the local factory, it was time for Zhang Heng and Zhang Hui to enter middle school. Holding hands, Heng and Hui, walked the six blocks together to the school. Walking past dilapidated stores with barred windows where groceries or appliances were sold, past outside stalls that sold all manner of trinkets, they encountered all manner of people, including Han and Uighur and other ethnic groups. They encountered the indigent who begged for food or money, and the well-to- do who keenly kept their distance from the rest of the souls upon the street.

If the Cultural Revolution was an astounding change for Zhang Heng and her family, the move into Kashgar proper was no less a revelation. As Han Chinese, they comprised part of the Chinese majority of the Middle Kingdom. But in Kashgar, in western Xinjiang Province, they were simply a minority; in Kashgar, the majority of people were the Uighurs. Praying to a Muslim god, in a country that didn’t officially countenance the notion of a higher being, the Uighurs had different traditions and a way of life that was foreign to Zhang Heng and her family. Shy and reserved, a girl who made few friends on the collective farm with girls her own age, Zhang Heng made even fewer friends among the young Uighur children with whom she attended class. Complaining to her mother that other children didn’t want to play with her, complaining that she didn’t fit in, her mother reassured her that in time, she would have friends; in time, she would enjoy school; in time, the future would be a new and better world. But as time passed, and sixth grade became seventh grade, and seventh grade became eighth, she still felt as much an outsider as ever. Nor did the exciting future that her mother promised her unfold for Zhang Heng. But if she didn’t quite fit in in school or with friends in the neighborhood, the solitude that Zhang Heng endured made her strong, it made her resilient. It gave her insight into what life was all about. Already by the time she had finished middle school, Zhang Heng had seen what life in its cruelties could bring people. Seeing little but destitution about her, finding little solace in friends or family, Zhang swore that someday she would get out of China. She would get out and she would never come back.

lthough she hated school, although she secretly despised her classmates, Zhang Heng was an exceptional student. She was an exceptional student in spite of herself. Rather than spending her free time playing with classmates, Heng scoured her textbooks, toiling over her homework. There were only one or two in her class that consistently scored higher than her on exams. Because of her scholastic achievements, she was afforded a scholarship upon graduation from high school. The scholarship paid for her four years as an undergraduate at Xinjiang University. Upon the completion of her freshman year in the college, she decided to become a nurse, and entered the nursing program. Rather than dreaming of becoming a nurse, she saw the calling as a means to an end. There would always be a need for nurses wherever she went, and perhaps one day it would safely see her out of China. At the nursing school in Urumqi, she took courses in English as did many of the other nursing students. Having started her English classes in middle school, Heng was already rather fluent in the language by the time she took it as an undergraduate. This was important, for to work overseas as a nurse, one had to be proficient in English. Though she had taken English classes since since she was an adolescent, Heng had never taken an English name. While in nursing school, she assumed the name Sarah. It was an unusual name for a Chinese girl to be taking: most of the other nursing students named themselves Kitty or Li, Iris or Cindy. Having adopted a Western name, she still preferred to be called by her given Chinese name, Heng. The irony of it was lost on her. Like the other nursing students who took English courses, she someday hoped to go to the Middle East, England, Europe, or with luck, the United States. At the time, there was a relative shortage of nurses in these countries, and with the proper credentials she might possibly work overseas. So many of the overseas jobs, though, required previous overseas experience, overseas experience working in English.

Following graduation, to further her training, to get a little practical experience, Zhang Heng became a nurse at Urumqi Tianshan Hospital. There, she worked on the surgical floor with patients who had their gall bladders or appendixes removed, or their broken bones set. Friendship Hospital was a large hospital, one with over several hundred beds. The work was demanding. Often requiring hours of overtime that she was not compensated for, she soon wearied of work in the overcrowded, fetid, and filthy hospital.

She had been there for little more than a year, she saw an ad in a nursing journal. The ad promised a well-paying job and good working conditions for foreign nurses – foreign nurses who could speak English – in Saudi Arabia. Though she had hoped to find similar positions in England or the United States, at the time, they were either not available or they required previous work experience overseas working in a hospital where the common language was English. The job in Saudi Arabia required no such overseas experience. Tearing the ad out of the magazine, she soon submitted her curriculum vitae to the nursing placement agency. Within a month, a letter arrived, typed in English, informing her that the job, if she still wanted it, at the King Khalid Hospital, was hers. Her salary in Riyadh would almost be three times what it was in Urumqi.

Finally, on a particularly cold and windy day, when low, broad, dark clouds closed out the sun, and winter waged its long siege on the western highlands of Xinjiang, she boarded the flight in Urumqi that would deliver her first to Beijing where she would make connections to Riyadh. Where it had been a minus five degrees in Urumqi when she boarded her flight, it was close to forty degrees without a breeze or cloud in the sky when she stepped off the plane onto the concrete tarmac. Seeping up from the asphalt, she felt the desert heat penetrate her denim slacks and cotton blouse she wore getting off the plane. Perspiration glistened on her forehead and dampened the small of her back as she strode across the tarmac into the arrival lounge. A van from the hospital was there to pick her and two other nurses – nurses she had never met – up and take them back to the hospital campus where their apartments were. Arriving at the hospital compound, she found herself assigned to a bedroom with a girl of similar age from Xi’an. Graceful, cheerful, tall and out-going – many of the things that Zhang Heng wasn’t – the nurse’s name was Peng Peng. Despite, or because of, their many differences, they soon became close friends. The day after her arrival in Riyadh, Peng Peng took her shopping for new clothes. At the top of the list was a burka. On the hospital compound the nurses were free to wear any clothes they desired; in Riyadh, however, they had to wear a burka. Whether it was the law or simply the custom, none of the nurses had ever tried going into the city without wearing one. Feeling like she looked like a Halloween witch, Zhang Heng wore her burka as little as possible. Caring little for the restrictions imposed by interacting with the Saudis in the city, caring little to know any of the Saudis except those with whom she worked, Zhang Heng spent most of her time on the hospital compound when she wasn’t working. Almost all the nurses at the hospital were foreigners, many of them being from China or southeast Asia. With Peng Peng she spent hours together on their time off, playing cards, reading young women’s magazines, talking about boys, gossiping about the other nurses, and swimming in the hospital pool. At the pool, they could wear Western-style bathing suits and not worry about offending any of religious customs of their Muslim hosts.

Working on the medical floor of the hospital, Zhang Heng took care of patients with diabetes and heart and lung disease and cancer. She preferred taking care of medical patients to taking care of surgical patients like she had in the hospital in Urumqi. She performed their blood draws; she bathed and dressed them in their hospital gowns; she doled out their medications; she cleaned their bedpans. Months became years.

Though already proficient in English, her command of the language steadily improved with time. If she missed her family, she didn’t miss China.

t the same time, though she didn’t miss China, she didn’t care for the Middle East. Her nursing duties were far easier than they had been in Urumqi, but she had no desire to stay for more than a few years. The customs, the religion, the people were just too foreign to her. She continued to peruse the nursing journal ads looking for work in England or the United States.

The impetus that finally prompted her to leave Saudi Arabia and return to China was no less than a family cataclysm. It occurred when her father became ill. Although always a stout and hard-working fellow, Zhang Bo had the misfortune of contracting hepatitis when he was born. That stroke of bad luck he shared with one in ten of all Chinese. Eventually the hepatitis turned to cirrhosis, and the cirrhosis turned to liver cancer. Zhang Heng’s father retired from his job at the factory at the relatively young age of forty-nine. When she arrived back in Kashgar, after two and a half years in Saudi Arabia, Zhang Bo was just a jaundiced stick figure with a protuberant belly. The whites of his eyes were as yellow as the loess along the banks of the Yellow River. Taking a job at the local hospital as a nurse in the emergency department, where she worked nights, she spent her days nursing her father who grew weaker by the day. “Can’t you get him to eat,” her mother implored her. “Can’t you get him to take his medicine.” All Zhang Heng could do was shake her head. Her father was a strong-willed man who’d resolved in his own mind he was dying, and wasn’t for a minute going to follow the futile instructions of his family or his doctors. He refused to eat. He refused to take his medications. He lasted about nine months after Zhang Heng’s return to Kashgar.

Remaining in Kashgar for about a month after her father’s services, Heng then moved to Shanghai to assume a position as a registered nurse in a clinic that was designed to care for expats with medical insurance and the more well-healed Chinese who didn’t want to deal with the inefficiency, the ineptitude, or the filth of the Chinese clinics and hospitals. Aptly, the clinic was called the International Medical Centre. A clinic for foreigners, she was convinced, would be better than working in a Chinese hospital or clinic. Nothing could be as dreadful as working at the hospital in Urumqi. During this time, there was a recession in the West and nursing jobs were hard to come by for foreign nurses, even those who had extensive experience overseas. To Zhang Heng, the private clinic seemed like a reasonable compromise. The pay at the International Medical Centre was better than it was for nurses in the local hospitals and she could keep up with her English language skills. IMC, as the clinic was called by the staff and the patients, was housed in an enormous, modern stone and steel structure that contained a five-star hotel, a shopping mall, and an office complex. The clinic took up the better part of the third floor of the shopping mall overlooking the Pu River. For four years, she had worked at the IMC.

There were only one or two patients in the waiting room of the International Medical Centre. There were only three or four patients in the exam rooms with their doctors. Business at the clinic that afternoon was slow. It had been slow probably due to the rain. In the nurses’s room, Zhang Heng knelt on a chair next to the window, one arm on the backrest, the other arm holding back the drape, looking out at the street and river below. Rain continued to splatter on the street and river below her. “Still raining?” asked Xiao Chen, the chief nurse, sitting at her desk, her back to the window. JoAnne Wang and Gao Peng, two of the other full-time nurses, were also in the staff room. Some of the nurses went by their adopted English names, while some went by their Chinese ones. Zhang Heng went by Sarah, the name emblazoned on her name tag, though she preferred to be called Heng.

“Still raining,” replied Zhang Heng looking over her shoulder at Xiao Chen.

“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, too,” replied Xiao Chen, without looking up from the nursing schedule that she was making up for the next month. Just then the phone rang. Chen picked up the receiver. It was the receptionists’ desk. “Hao da,” said Chen into the phone. Placing the receiver down in its cradle, she turned to the other nurses sitting behind her. “Dr. Abrahim wants some blood drawn on his patient,” she said. “He wants a blood count and coags. The patient’s in the treatment room.”

“I’ll go,” said Gao Peng, who started to stand up from the chair where she was sitting.

“No, I’ll go,” said Zhang Heng. “You did the last blood draw. It’s my turn. Besides, there’s nothing to see but the rain, and I’m getting bored.” Getting up from the chair where she was kneeling, she placed the drape back where it had been. She walked over to the shelf next to the back wall of the nurses’s station and reaching up took a phlebotomy tray from the shelf. On the metal tray were alcohol swabs, gauze, bandaids, blood tubes, a tourniquet, and a green, plastic Vacutainer holder with stainless steel needle for the blood tubes. Washing her hands with soap, she then walked down the clinic’s sole hallway to the treatment room. On the plastic paper holder on the door was deposited the lab request for the blood sample.

Zhang Heng opened the door. Sitting in a chair, the chair where the patients sat when the nurses drew their blood, was a smallish man, the heels of his shoes barely touching the floor. She looked at the blood order sheet for the man’s name: it was Rosenthal, Joshua Rosenthal. Inquiring if this was indeed him, he nodded as he replied amiably, “Call me Josh, everyone else does.” he said as he began unbuttoning the cuff of his right sleeve. “What may I call you?” He was a thin man, all sinew and bone, with a sharp protuberant nose and cheek bones that gave him the look of an exotic predatory bird. Thin wisps of reddish hair going grey hair stuck out from the sides of the crown of his head, the majority of his scalp being bald. He laughed jovially as he asked her her name. With his manner, with his red hair protruding from the side of his head, and with his twinkling eyes, he reminded Heng of a circus clown she had once seen in an old American movie about the Ringling Brothers. A big bulbous nose and over-sized shoes would have completed the picture. Though he had the enormous smile of a circus clown, his smile was the least bit crooked.

Slightly abashed, not knowing how seriously to take his jovial manner, she said. “The others call me Heng. You can call me Sarah.”

“No, I like Heng.” He smiled even more broadly. “Heng, that’s a pretty name I like

Heng well enough.”

“I need your left arm.” She set the phlebotomy tray down on the table next to the chair where Rosenthal sat and then took the chair facing him.

“Heng, you see I’m left-handed, so they always draw the blood from my right arm.”

“They do?...In China, they say that left-handed people are clever. Are you clever Mr. Rosenthal?”

He guffawed. “You tell me!”

‘If I had to guess, I’d think you’re clever enough. Now, let’s see your right arm then.” Having unbuttoned the cuff, he rolled up his right shirtsleeve.

“Yes. I have an INR done every two weeks. See, I’m on warfarin as a blood thinner so they have to follow my coagulation studies to make sure I’m taking the right amount.

You see I had a blood clot. I had a blood clot that went to my lungs. Been on warfarin ever since... Hey, I remember you. I remember you well. You’ve drawn my blood before.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.” He’d finished rolling up the sleeve on his right arm. Heng surveyed his veins for a place to stick the Vacutainer needle.

“Oh, I remember. I recall you well. The other nurses usually have trouble drawing my blood. You hit the vein on the first try. You might not remember, but it’s the sort of thing that a patient remembers, believe me. Nobody likes to get stuck twice.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She took the rubber hose that served as the tourniquet and wrapped it around his frail arm. She sat down on the stool next to his chair and began patting down the hollow of his elbow to get the veins to swell and come up. Gazing at him, seeing the thin, reddish-gray hair over the bald scalp, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, the creases that spread out radially from his mouth and the few liver spots on his face, she assumed Rosenthal was her father’s age, her father’s age when he had still been alive. “Make a fist,” she told him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know the routine.” Smiling, he made a fist. If only half her patients were this enthused when they had to have their blood drawn.

“I guess they would if they had to have this done every two weeks.” She put on latex gloves. With an alcohol swab, she cleansed the small hollow of his elbow, where she’d be drawing the blood. Having sterilized the area, she took out the Vacutainer and placed one of the blood sample tubes in it. “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she said as she drove the vacutainer needle into his skin. When she pushed the Vacutainer tube into the Vacutainer, no blood came out. She had missed the vein. She missed the vein that she apparently had no trouble hitting before when she drew Rosenthal’s blood. Moving the Vacutainer back and forth and in and out, she probed searching for the vein. “You shouldn’t have said anything about me being the only nurse who could draw your blood,” she muttered. “I’ve missed. Hold on.” She plunged the needle in one slightly deeper. Suddenly, blood spurted into the Vacutainer tube. As the blood rushed in, she released the tourniquet. “There we go.” In all, she took two Vacutainer bottles from Rosenthal, one for a blood count and one for coagulation studies. Having drawn the blood, she withdrew the needle setting it next to the two full Vacutainer tubes that she had placed on the phlebotomy tray. Applying pressure to the site where she had drawn the blood, she then placed a bandage over it. Standing up, she gathered the blood tubes, the vacutainer, the gauze and the bandaid wrapper onto the phlebotomy tray.

“That wasn’t that bad,” said Rosenthal. He was still smiling. Was he smiling because he was nervous or was he smiling just because he had such a jovial manner? She wondered. Despite the age on his face, his teeth shone. They were the teeth of a much younger man. She supposed they were capped. “Heng, you seem friendlier than the rest of the nurses. You’re friendlier and you’re definitely gentler. I want you to be the one drawing my blood every two weeks from now on. Can I do that? Can I request you?”

“You can request me. Whether you get me or not is entirely a different matter.”

“What do you mean it might be a different matter?”

“I might be busy with other patients.”

“Oh, I’ll request you, anyway. You can count on it.” He laughed, this time the laugh exploding like the braying of a donkey.

“You married?” he said, the teeth shining, the eyes crinkling.

“I beg your pardon.” Zhang Heng, who wasn’t a girl who blushed easily, suddenly felt her face flush. Levinson continued laughing, but this time he seemed to be giggling, like some adolescent schoolgirl.

“I said, are you married?” She stood up from the stool holding the phlebotomy tray with the two blood-filled tubes. She looked down at the tubes of blood lying on the phlebotomy tray.

“Why do you ask that?” His eyes twinkled like those of a young boy watching the fireworks on the eve of the Chinese New Year.

“I was just curious.” He rose from the phlebotomy chair with a spring in his step. All he needed were out-sized shoes and to go along with a clown’s costume and he would be ready for the big top. She turned and headed for the door. “You never answered my question,” he said. “It’s a harmless question. Are you married?”

She turned and faced him. “No, I’m not.”

“Didn’t think so,” said Rosenthal. “Didn’t think so. I sensed that in you. I sensed you were single. I’m seldom wrong about those things.”

“Telepathy?” This was a man, she thought, who could wear you down with his questions.

“How about having dinner with me some night.” When he wasn’t laughing, he was smiling.

“I don’t think so,” she said. This man – a man old enough to be her father – was making a pass at her and she didn’t quite know how to respond. Not only was he old enough to be her father, he was a foreigner. This was a situation she had never encountered before. Even in the Middle East, no one had approached her quite like this. She had never dated a man this much older than she was. She had never dated a foreigner, not even in Riyadh.

“There some rule about it? Not dating a patient?”

“You have a good day, Mr. Rosenthal,” she said opening the door for him.

“Think about it,” he said as he passed by her going out the door. “Think about it.” He laughed as he passed by her going through the door. “I won’t bite. I’m already house- broken.”

“I bet you are.”

Walking down the clinic corridor to deliver the blood tubes to the lab, she thought about Joshua Rosenthal. She thought about his invitation to dinner. She looked down at the lab sheet that she held in her hand. In the upper right hand corner was Joshua Rosenthal’s name, his clinic number, and his date-of-birth. Rosenthal was almost eight years older than her dad was when the liver cancer overcame him. Something in Rosenthal’s character made him seem much younger.

She deposited the blood tubes in the lab and went back to the nurses’s room. JoAnne Wang and Gao Peng were still sitting where they were when she left them to deposit the blood. “Just who is this Joshua Rosenthal I drew blood on?” she asked Xiao Chen when she returned to the nurses’s room after dropping off the blood tubes in the lab.

“He’s harmless,” she replied looking up from the schedule she was still working on. She licked the lead on her pencil and went back to work on the schedule.

“He’s just another Lao Wei with too much time and money on their hands,” added Gao Peng.

“He’s always smiling and hitting on the nurses,” said JoAnne Wang. “I’m surprised you hadn’t met him before. I think he’s a little bit creepy.”

“You think all of Abrahim’s patients are creepy,” said Heng.

“Well, they are,” replied JoAnne smiling. “Especially Joshua Rosenthal.” Gao Peng laughed. There was a certain truth to what JoAnne was saying. Abrahim had a strange following of patients.

In time, it became a ritual: every two weeks Joshua Rosenthal saw Dr. Abrahim; every two weeks he requested that Zhang Heng draw his blood. If her time wasn’t occupied with another patient, she would oblige him. He would laugh as he rolled his sleeve up; he would laugh as she swabbed down his arm with alcohol; and, he would laugh as she stuck the needle in. If he felt any discomfort as she poked him with the Vacutainer needle, he didn’t show it. Unlike the first time she drew his blood, she was unfailingly successful on getting blood on her first try wit him in the future. Throughout the blood drawing procedure, he would talk, the talk usually centering around questions he had about Heng. Guessing he was an American, she was surprised when he told her he was from Toronto. When she told him that she didn’t know if she could take the cold weather, he said that he couldn’t either and that was one of the reasons he came to Shanghai. When she asked him what he did for a living, he told her, “I’m in promotions. Oil and gas promotions.” To Zhang Heng, all the foreigners seemed to be promoting something, so she wasn’t surprised. Each time she drew his blood, he had more and more questions for her. Where was she from? Where else had she worked? When she told him that she had been to Saudi Arabia, he asked her how she liked it? Did they make her wear a burka? Did it feel funny wearing one? How did she like Shanghai? How did she learn to speak English so well? Not only did he seem as jovial as a young boy, he seemed as curious as one, too.

Every time she drew his blood, he asked her out to dinner. Every time, she declined. Each time, she had a new excuse. In spite of herself, she enjoyed talking to Joshua Rosenthal. Unlike the other expats, he seemed to listen to her when she talked. Unlike the other expats, he didn’t seem to take himself too seriously. Finally, a few months after she had first drawn his blood, she accepted his invitation. He had flat out worn her down. There was no regulation that a nurse could not go out with a patient. Besides it was just dinner. Dinner was just dinner. That was all that it was.

Late on a fall night, after she’d finished in the clinic, she met Joshua Rosenthal at an expensive Sichuan restaurant that she had always wanted to try, but was beyond her means. As she had tried to explain to the man, the only real differences between an expensive Chinese restaurant and a cheap one was that the more expensive restaurants were cleaner. They were also more likely to cheat you when the bill came.

Driving by bus, which deposited her a few blocks from the restaurant, she felt the breeze that was stirring the leaves that had not yet fallen from the branches of the willows that lined the sidewalks. The breeze, coming off the ocean, had cleared the air of any haze. Gazing up, she could see the evening stars poking through the sky. It reminded her of seeing the stars when she was a little girl in Kashgar. Then, as tonight, they appeared so clear and so near that it looked as though one could reach out and touch them. Not wanting to seem to eager to him, she was ten minutes late in getting to the restaurant. Not wanting to seem too wanton, she wore a modest blue dress. Waiting at the entrance of the restaurant, he held a single red rose for her. Taking it in her hand, she held it up to her nose and smelled it. Nodding her head, she thanked him for the gesture. He took her hand and kissed it. He had made her blush a second time. Wearing slacks, a polo shirt, and top-siders, he was dressed casually.

Inside the restaurant, most of the tables were packed with well-healed Shanghai residents. The hostess, wearing a scarlet silk dress, ushered them to the back of the restaurant where Rosenthal had reserved a booth. Before the hostess even had time to summon a waitress, Rosenthal ordered a dry martini. “What are you having?” he asked Heng. Like most Chinese women, Heng rarely drank alcohol. Tonight, she felt like something stronger than non-alcoholic drink, but she didn’t think she dared, this being her first time out with Levinson. Heng ordered a concoction of orange and pineapple juice.

“What are your plans?” he asked congenially once they were seated. With his elbows on the table, he rubbed his hands together. He rubbed his hands together as though he was about to conjure a magic trick.

“What plans?” Heng had only been half paying attention. She was trying to take in all the ornate decorations of the expensive restaurant. Still, the question seemed confusing. “What plans do you mean?”

“I mean what are your plans. What’s the overall picture. What do you want to do with your life? Just what do you want out of life. You have to want something.” Before she could answer, the waitress brought them their drinks, setting them down on leather coasters on the red tablecloths. When the waitress asked them if they knew what they wanted to eat, Joshua Levinson replied in broken Chinese to “give them a few minutes.” Not a word he’d said in Chinese had the waitress understood. Heng told the woman in Mandarin to give them a few minutes. “So what are your plans?” Levinson repeated.

“I want to get out of China.” Her own frankness amazed her. Normally, she would show more discretion. Only a few of the nurses in the clinic were aware of Heng’s desire to leave China. “I want to make a life for myself somewhere outside of China.”

Sitting across from her, the palm of his right hand cupped, supporting his chin. At that precise moment, she wished she had ordered something stronger, something with a little alcohol, to take the edge off her feelings. Levinson could be disarmingly charming, but he always seemed to come around to things she didn’t want to talk about.

“I thought you’d be more concerned about getting married,” he said, smiling. His smile was definitely a little crooked, rising higher on the left side than the right. His smile was crooked like a huckster’s proffering items of questionable quality or integrity.

Refusing to be completely frank with him, she said, “I’m not that concerned about getting married.” Zhang Heng’s candor was only going to go so far.

“You’re not,” he said, beaming. He began rubbing his hands together again. He rubbed his hands and then took a deep gulp of his martini. “That’s something of a revelation. You’re not married. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“You ask a lot of questions.” She looked down at her lap. Seeing that the pleats of her skirt were askew, she straightened them out with her hands.

“But you still have not told me whether you had a boyfriend or not? You told me that you weren’t married, but you didn’t mention anything about a boyfriend. I mean you’re an attractive woman. You must have a boyfriend. I’m dying to find out. What would it take for you to tell me?” Rosenthal plucked one of the olives from his martini, popping it into his mouth. He washed it down with another sip of his martini.

“Not right now. We broke up a couple of months ago. He went back to his old girlfriend...I’d like to talk about something else, something more interesting.” She tried smiling at Rosenthal, but it was a thin, nervous smile. She suspected that Rosenthal could tell how tense she was.

“Now, I find that fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.” His arms shot out, palms up. He began waving his arms like a young chick attempting to take flight. Then he placed the the palms of both hands back on the table. “I find you absolutely fascinating. Why would any hot-blooded Chinese man let you go. Certainly, there are a lot of men asking you out to dinner?” He chortled as though she had said something very clever and amusing. “There’s nothing more interesting to me right now than that.”

“There are more interesting things in life than boyfriends.” She turned to the waitress. “Fuwuyuan,” she said. The woman came over to the table. “I’ll take some red wine.”

“Is there something wrong with your juice?” inquired the waitress.

“No. I just feel like a glass of red wine,” she stammered.

“We have a red house wine. It’s a Merlot.”

“Anything will do.”

When the waitress had retreated, he said, “Most of the Chinese women that I’ve known just care about boyfriends and getting married and having a family.” For a brief moment he frowned. Then he smiled again. There was a small gap between his front teeth.

“I’m not your typical Chinese woman,” said Zhang Heng abruptly. “I didn’t say I didn’t want them. I just said I wanted to get out of China. If I can get out of China, the rest will fall in place. Besides, I’m through with Chinese men.”

“Are you so sure?” The man shrugged in his shoulders as though to say, “Are you kidding me?” When he smiled, his eyebrows writhed like pennants in the wind.

“I want a family. I just don’t want a Chinese husband. They’re too vain...they’re too fickle. They’re too immature. They complain about everything. They complain about everything and don’t do the least to change things. They’re just not men. At least not the man my father was. He was a true man.”

“Sounds like you have some fairly strong opinions on the subject. Sounds like you’ve had a couple of bad experiences.” He smiled, but this time didn’t laugh. “You must have been close to your father.”

She nodded her head. “I was close to him. I was as close to him as a daughter can be to her father. He saw me through a lot. He saw the family through a lot. Most men these days can’t even keep the promises they make. I remember my father holding my hand, walking me to school. I remember him lifting me up the steps of the train that carried my family to Xinjiang when I was a little girl.”

“Sounds like he was quite a man.”

“He was. In his own way he was a very great man.” The waitress returned with her glass of Merlot. She took a sip.

“He still alive.”

“No, he passed away a couple of years ago. He had cancer. Liver cancer.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Levinson, now with all the probity of a small town judge. “Must of been very hard on you.”

“It was. It was hard on all the family.” Heng opened the menu going through it page by page, the dishes in photographs with their names in both Mandarin and English.

“But you don’t want to settle down with a Chinese boyfriend?”

“No,” she replied sharply. “I already told you that. I just know that I don’t want to marry a Chinese man. Besides if I marry one, I’ll never get away from this place.”

“You’re sure about all this?” His hands, which had been balled up into two small fists on the table, he spread out on the tablecloth. Again, he seemed to be setting her up for some sort of card trick.

“These days, I’m not sure of anything,” she replied. “I’d just like it to be that way...Certainly there are more interesting things to talk about.” She paused and looked down at the menu.

“Sounds like you need a boyfriend, a Westerner. A Lao Wei.” He smiled from ear-to- ear.

“Fuwuyuan,” she said abruptly to the waitress. She was beginning to regret that she ever accepted the dinner invitation. “What do you want to eat?”

“The Gung Pao Chicken is always good.”

“That’s all you foreigners eat. Let’s try something a little different. Do you mind spicy food?”

“Do you mean, do I like it. I love it. I love it.” He chuckled. “Go ahead and order. The spicier the better.” He set his menu on the table.

Zhang Heng continued to peruse the menu. Taking her time, she knew that the questions would abate until she had finished ordering. Telling the waitress that they wanted hot, diced chicken as the main course, she ordered some cold dishes and one hot dish of vegetables. All the while she was ordering their dinner, Levinson just nodded his head as if he knew what she was saying. When she’d finished and the waitress had headed off to the kitchen with their order, she told him what she had requested for their dinner. “Sounds good to me,” he said laughing softly. “Now, where were we?”

“We were talking about boyfriends,” she said.

“Oh, yes. About your boyfriends.” He chuckled.

“I don’t want to talk about them again tonight. They’re all ancient history. Besides, I don’t know you that well. Okay?”

“Okay, I’ll give you all the time in the world to know me better” he insisted, finishing his martini. “Would you ask the waitress to bring another one for me?” When Heng got the waitress’s attention, Rosenthal waved the empty martini glass in the air, as though he needed another one.

Moments passed. Heng watched couples come and go into the restaurant. She could feel the warm flush of the wine by now. Changing the subject, she said, “Tell me, what sort of things do you promote? All the expats I meet here, especially the ones at the clinic, say they promote one thing or another.” This, she thought, was safe territory. All the expats she had met in Shanghai, particularly in the clinic expounded on their exploits in the East to make money. To make money and obtain power.

“I suppose they do. I suppose they do...Like I told you in the clinic, I promote oil and gas leases here in Asia. Right now, I’ve been going to Kazakhstan, Turkestan, Uzbekistan...all the Stans. They’ve been discovering big gas fields all around China. I do a little business in China, but most of it is just outside the country. Most of the oil and gas isn’t in China, but China is in the middle of all the places I do business. Right now, business is hopping. Couldn’t be better...So where is it you’d like to go when you leave China?” This time, he managed to get out a couple of sentences without laughing. He managed to impress her with a certain amount of enthusiasm when he talked about his business. While he was expanding on his business ventures, the waitress had come out with plates of steaming food. He stopped talking long enough to ease the chopsticks into position in his left hand.

“Just about anywhere. Anywhere, but the Middle East.” She felt herself opening up to this odd man who seemed so optimistic and jovial, like a beloved uncle or a wily politician in the Party. “I’ve already been there. But I’ve told you that.” The few years working in Riyadh had consumed a lot of the conversation that she had had with him in the clinic. “I’d like to go to England,” she said, “but I’d prefer to go to the United States.”

“You think that that’s the land of milk and honey?”

“Yeah, the land of milk and honey” The land of all your dreams?” Levinson was fidgeted with his chopsticks. He ate with more grace than the average foreigner, but he still had not mastered the fine art of eating with chopsticks. The large pieces of chicken he managed to snare with his chopsticks, but he was hopeless with the smaller, greasier morsels of meat. Rosenthal was a finicky eater. Perhaps that was why he was so slender for a man his age.

“I don’t know. I do know it would be a damn sight better than here. I’m tired of being overworked and underpaid,” she added. What she just told him surprised her: she never swore and she had only told one or two of the nurses in the clinic of her desire to leave China. Rosenthal continued nodding; he continued listening attentively. Seemingly tired of struggling with his chopsticks trying to pick up some of the smaller pieces of chicken, he set them down on the table and returned to his martini.

“Could be as bad there as it is here,” Rosenthal replied. “Lot of people back home in Canada and the States are complaining about the wages and hours.” He took another drink from his martini and then spread his hands with his fingers splayed out on the table one more time. This was a man who couldn’t seem to talk without laughing or moving his hands in the most peculiar of gestures. “I think that if the economy continues on like it is in the States those same people will be grateful to just have jobs. That’s just me,” he said, smiling.

“Somehow, I doubt it.” Silences gathered as they ate. Despite Rosenthal’s difficulty with the chopsticks, they were soon through eating. Heng ordered a second glass of wine which she sipped listening to Rosenthal expand on his life. She put down her chopsticks and placed her dish aside. As the waitress collected their plates, he ordered another martini.

“Ever married?” she asked him.

“Twice married, twice divorced.” Laughing, he held up two fingers as though he was making a “V” for victory sign. “Made a lot of money for the attorneys. A lot of money.”

“That would seem to make you a two-time loser,” Zhang Heng said. Divorce seemed like such a casual matter to the Westerners she knew.

“Perhaps so,” Rosenthal said, shrugging his shoulders. “Perhaps not.”

“In China, divorce is a disgrace,” she exclaimed. “It represents a personal failure.”

“Well, it’s not quite that way we see it in the West. It’s not that way in Canada. It’s not that way in the States or in Europe. Not that it’s something to be proud of, no sir. It’s not something to be proud of, but it’s not a disgrace. It may be a failure, but it’s not a disgrace.”

“Maybe it should be.” Heng swirled what was left of the red wine in her goblet and then swallowed it. “You’re an odd man, Mr. Rosenthal. Maybe not odd, but just different.”

“My ex-wives would definitely say that.” Again, he guffawed. He brushed his hand across his forehead as though he was wiping away a sheen of perspiration. He beamed.

“Say that you’re odd.”

“Probably say that I’m different. I was twenty-two when I married my first wife. I was just a year out of college, trying to claw my way up the corporate ladder. She was a good Jewish girl, my first wife. Good in every sense of the word. I stayed with her for fifteen years. We had a boy and a girl.”

“What happened?”

“We drifted apart. I had my career. She had her family, our family” he said, spreading his arms apart. “I was working twelve hour days and she was home alone with the kids. I didn’t have the time for her. I didn’t have the time for them. As time wore on, we drifted further and further apart. It just wasn’t working out. At some point all the love in the marriage was just gone. It was as simple as that.”

“Was it worth it?” As she asked, she looked around the restaurant at the other couples. Which ones were married? Which ones weren’t? Which ones would eventually divorce?

“Was what worth it?” He acted as though he failed to understand the question.

“Getting the divorce from your first wife. Was it worth it?”

“Oh, my. Heavens yes.” He grinned, draining the second martini. “We’d be miserable if we were still together. She married a lawyer two years after we split up. A real mensch.”

“What’s a mensch?” She dabbed at a speck of rice resting on her chin.

“It’s Yiddish. A mensch is a stand-up guy. Someone who could be there for her. Be there for her the way I never could. The way I’d never wanted to be...No she traded up in the bargain. She got a good deal. I was pleased for her. I was happy she got what she wanted. I was even happier I got what I wanted.” A gracious smile played across his face. It was the gracious smile of a pastor greeting his flock as they passed through the doorway out of the church when services were over.

“I see...”

“No you don’t...you can’t possibly understand.” Suddenly Rosenthal seemed very serious, speaking with some vehemence. “You’re too young. You’ve never been married. You’ve never had kids. You’ve never had to deal with in-laws. You’ve never had to deal with in-laws that you couldn’t stand. You’ve never been up all night nursing one of your kid’s fevers. You’ve never had to make the rounds with the family on all the religious holidays. You’ve never started to grow old with anybody. You’ve never had to put up with the ups and downs of a relationship. You just don’t know.” Rosenthal stirred his martini with the plastic swizzle stick. Then he took the swizzle stick and swallowed the two olives that were still impaled on it.

“Maybe I don’t,” she said. For a moment she was silent. The joviality had abruptly disappeared. “Maybe I don’t.” Heng looked over at the waitress to see if she had heard any of Rosenthal’s brief tirade. Levinson looked over at her, too. As he did so, she caught his eye. He began waving his empty martini glass. Guessing, Heng said, “Make that one more martini.” With some hesitancy, she asked, “So tell me about your second marriage?”

“I was on the rebound. Just like in the movies, just like in all the dime novels, I married my secretary. She was a very pretty, very efficient young woman, but she was a goy.”

“What’s a goy?”

“She wasn’t of the faith. She wasn’t Jewish. First wives are almost always Jewish. Second wives...” He raised his arm and with a rocking, up and down motion with his hand that indicated maybe yes, maybe no, he said, “I don’t know why it’s that way. It mystifies me to this day.”

“Did it matter?”

He took a sip of his martini before he replied. “That. Not really. The Jewish bit wasn’t a problem. It was the rest of it. For years she had managed my office. I thought she could manage my life. She couldn’t. Where she had always been friendly and cheerful at work, she became an obnoxious, hypochondriacal bore. We got divorced three years later. There were no children. It was an amicable split. In fact, I’m still on amiable terms with both my wives. There weren’t a lot of hard feelings when the marriages fell apart. Both divorces were unusual in that way.” Where he had seemed somewhat jovial a few minutes ago, he now seemed somewhat morose.

“It doesn’t sound as though you liked being married.”

“Liked it. I loved it for a few years. Then it just wore out. Both times, it just wore a little bit thin. I liked it well enough in the beginning both times.”

“I understand.”

“I just wish you did.” Just as quickly as his mood had changed before, it changed again. He flashed her that same big top smirk. There was that twinkle in his eyes.

Once they departed the restaurant, they strolled down the Bund. The sun having set, the street lights were on. Due to the change in season, many of the leaves had fallen, and the harsh light of the overhead street lamps filtered through the bare branches of the trees along the sidewalk. Though it was autumn, it was still warm enough for her to stroll along without wearing the sweater that she’d brought with her. In her high heels, strolling beside him, she found that Rosenthal was scarcely taller than she was. Reflecting off the water of the Pu River was the pale moonlight of the rising half-crescent of the moon. A breeze was blowing in over the water. It was a dry, cool breeze that took the edge off the humidity that had so oppressed the city over the past few months. The Bund was thronging with people. Couples ambled arm-in arm; apartment dwellers walked home carrying shopping bags full of goods; tourist groups trod behind their guides who held up banners for them to follow; and, panhandlers approached all those who went by, shaking their cellophane cups at the pedestrians begging for money. Heng walked beside Levinson for about a half hour. Walking with his hands in his pockets, he talked a little bit about his life and when he wasn’t talking he was whistling some tune or other that she didn’t recognize. Here and there, Rosenthal told her more about his life. His life growing up in Toronto, his parents running a mom-and-pop grocery store in a predominantly Jewish section of Toronto; of his life in the oil and gas business; and, of his move to China two years ago. “This is where the money is,” he informed her. “You mark my words, China is where the action is. And it’s gonna be that way for a long time.”

“Not for me,” Zhang Heng replied. “Not for me...Now, I must be getting home.”

“You sure.” He made an audible sigh, feigning great disappointment.

“I’m sure. I have a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Let me catch you a cab.” Heng, who was used to riding buses in Shanghai, was not about to turn down a free taxi ride. Rosenthal waved down a cab. He opened the door for her. After she got in the back seat, he asked. “Can we do this again?”

“You mean dinner?”

“Of course, I mean dinner. What else could I mean?” Levinson smiled. “Dinner. Just the two of us.”

Biting down on her lower lip, she said, “I suppose so.”

“I’ve had a very pleasant evening,” he said, bending over and kissing her on the cheek. The touch of his lips was not all that unappealing.

“Me, too.” She smiled off into the distance, giving her address to the cab driver.

Handing the cab driver two twenty RMB notes, he said, “This ought to get you home.” As the cab pulled away, she glanced back at Rosenthal. Tugging on his shirtsleeve, a panhandler was begging for money. Rosenthal shook the beggar’s hand away abruptly and waved to her in the departing taxi.

In the taxi, on the way home, she reflected upon the evening. Joshua Rosenthal was an unusual, perhaps even peculiar, man. Still, she had enjoyed his company, despite his almost adolescent demeanor. He was kind; he was considerate; and, he was generous. These were things that her two previous Chinese boyfriends had lacked.

Age, she told herself, was something relative. Besides, she was soon to be twenty-nine and that was practically middle age for a Chinese woman. Finally, she wondered if Joshua Rosenthal could possibly open doors for her to get out of China. She suspected he could. She hoped he could.

As soon as she reached her apartment, she kicked off her high heels and picked up her mobile phone. She dialed her sister, Hui, in Beijing. It was just after ten and Hui would still be up after putting her daughter to bed. Hui answered on the third ring.

“How are you?” inquired Heng. Just fine, her sister told her. Then she asked about her husband and her young daughter. Her daughter was named Heng after her. They exchanged further pleasantries about their mother, work, and life. Then, Heng came out and asked her, “What do you think of older men?”

“What do I think of older men?”

“Yeah, what do you think of older men?”

“It depends. How old?”

“Old...Old as dad.”

“It all depends. Is he nice? Does he have any money?” Hui’s husband had been unemployed as an accountant for three months and even before that they had lived from paycheck to paycheck. For Hui, money was important in a relationship.

“I think so.”

“A lot.”

“Enough. Besides he’s nice.”

Heng could hear her sister sigh on the other end of the line. “Money can erase a lot of problems,” she said. “Of course, dad would never have approved. You can be certain that mom won’t approve.”

“I don’t need her permission anymore.”

“I guess not.” They talked for a few more minutes. Heng told Hui how she had met Rosenthal and what he did for a living. For a few more minutes, they just talked about life again, and how each of them was getting along. That night, when she went to bed, she wondered what it would be like to be rich. What it would be like to be rich and living somewhere outside China.

Fall that year in Shanghai was blessedly languid and warm. Gone were the thundershowers of the summer. The sun each day traced its arc in a cloudless sky. Zhang Heng began seeing Joshua Rosenthal each weekend for dinner, each restaurant different, each restaurant more than a little out of her means. Soon, it was a few nights a week. If Rosenthal begrudged Heng’s expensive taste in restaurants, he never complained. As date followed date, as he began knowing Heng better, he started holding her hand as they stepped into the restaurants and when they sauntered down the sidewalks. Soon, she began letting him wrap his arm around her as they walked. Then came the night, she allowed him to kiss her on the mouth. Kissing her on the mouth was not nearly as repulsive as she thought it might be given Levinson’s age. No, it had not been repulsive at all. Despite the irrepressible grin, the sometime irritating laugh, she found herself growing more fond of Rosenthal. Joshua Rosenthal was a much more serious man than she had first given him credit for. He was indeed clever. Though he was generous, she could tell he was good with money. She suspected he was very rich by Chinese standards. Furthermore, she was pleased that she was seeing someone again, even if it was a man as old as Levinson. Doling out more and more money on her, she began spending the night in his upscale apartment in the heart of the city. In bed, for his age, he wasn’t without undue endurance as a lover.

One winter’s night, as the rain poured in Shanghai, they lay in bed, amongst the ruffled sheets of their love-making. Heng could hear the rain beating on the panes of the bedroom windows of Rosenthal’s apartment. In the dark silence, she wondered whether she really loved Rosenthal. She wondered whether it truly mattered. She was happy, she was content with the ways things were. At least for the moment. She wondered just what sort of commitment she was willing to make to him; she wondered what sort of commitment he was willing to make for her. “Are you ever going back to

Canada?” she asked him.

“Not in the winter. Not if I can help it,” he replied. She turned towards him in bed. He began running his hand up and down her naked flank, lingering over her hip.

“Take me with you.”

“You mean take you to Canada?”

“Yes, take me to Canada. I’ve always wanted to see it. I’m so weary of China. I’m so weary of Shanghai. I’ve got to get out of this place.”

“Well, I have no problems taking you to Toronto next time I go, but for God’s sake let it be anytime but winter. You have no idea how cold it gets there in the winter.” He laughed.

“You promise you’ll take me.”

“I’ll take you,” he said, kissing her gently on the forehead.

“Take me there and don’t bring me back.”

In the darkness, Rosenthal laughed again. “Well, that might be a different matter. Yes, sir, that might just be a different matter.

Disheartened, but not yet defeated, she dropped the matter.

That winter, Joshua Rosenthal began walking Zhang Heng to work. He would walk her to the vast complex that the International Medical Centre was in; he would take the elevator with her to the third floor; he would get off the elevator and, at the front door of the clinic, he would kiss her good-bye. With each week, she arrived in more and more revealing designer clothes that Levinson would buy her at exclusive boutiques in Shanghai. One day, she appeared in a sheer dress at the clinic before she changed into her nurses’s uniform. It became a scandal to those she worked with. Her demeanor, to some, was an affront to the propriety of the clinic. First, the nurses and receptionists gossiped about it. Then, Abrahim and the rest of the doctors talked about it. Abrahim even mentioned it to Tony Ng, the manager of the clinic. The both of them seemed to be immune to all the gossip that swirled around them. Heng found herself more and more alienated from the rest of the staff, while Rosenthal just beamed at the nurses and receptionists after he kissed Heng good-bye each day. He would beam at them like an innocent schoolboy and then wish them all well.

One day in January, when the sun was hidden behind the clouds and rain was threatening in Shanghai, Xiao Chen took Zhang Heng aside. She took her into the nurses’s room. No one else was inside. Chen indicated for her to sit down in a chair next to her desk. “I don’t know how to approach this,” she said after the two of them had sat down. “It’s all very awkward. It’s all very embarrassing. But still we have to discuss it. Dr. Abrahim came to me. He doesn’t think it’s appropriate that you’re seeing one of the clinic’s patients. Joshua Rosenthal. He doesn’t think that it’s appropriate that you’ve been seeing Joshua Rosenthal because he’s one of his patients.”

“It’s none of Dr. Abrahim’s business who I see now is it?” Zhang Heng felt the anger rise within her. She started to stand up.

“Now Heng,” Xiao Chen pleaded. “Please sit down...Sit down, please.” Zhang Heng slowly eased herself back into the chair in front of Chen’s desk. In order to keep her hands from trembling, she folded them together on her lap. Xiao Chen paused. Then she said, “There are a few people who don’t think that it’s appropriate for you to be seeing one of the patients. Maybe it’s none of their business, but they talk. They talk a lot.”

“Talk is cheap.”

“Talk may be cheap, but there are a lot of people here who don’t feel that it’s right for you to be seeing Mr. Levinson. They feel there’s something improper about all of it.”

“What do you think,” Heng said, her eyes moist with anger and resentment.

“It doesn’t matter what I think...”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Personally, I don’t care who you see. I do, though, care, that Mr. Levinson drops you off every morning and gives you a kiss good-bye. I think you could be much more discreet.”

“So if I were more discreet, it would be okay?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Chen. There are no rules that you can or can’t see a patient on your own town. There are no regulations. There might be ethical considerations, but there are no rules. For now, do what you want. I can’t prevent you from seeing Mr. Levinson. I wouldn’t want to, no matter what Dr. Abrahim thinks. I would recommend, however, that you say your good-byes somewhere besides the main entrance to the clinic. Dr. Abrahim has already gone to Mr. Ng about all this. If this keeps on, they might just let you go. I’d hate to see that. I’d hate to see you dismissed over such a minor matter.”

“So you agree that it’s none of their business?”

“I didn’t say that either. I’m just asking you to be more discreet. Do we understand each other.”

Zhang Heng nodded her head. “Can I go now?”

“I’ve said just about all I was going to say,” said Chen. “You may go. Let me just add one other thing. These late middle-aged men who come to China wanting young Chinese women. They’re just taking advantage of them. They meet them, they may marry them, but they suck the life right out of them.”

“May I go?” said Heng.

“Go, go,” said Chen, waving her hand.

Later, that evening, Heng told Levinson over dinner about her conversation with Xiao Chen. She was curious if Levinson would get angry; she was curious if Levinson would get resentful. He did neither. Chewing on a lobster at one of the better fish food restaurants in Shanghai, he just said, “Well, we’ll have to be more discreet.” Then he laughed.

Beginning the next day, Zhang Heng had nothing further to do with Joshua Rosenthal in the clinic. She didn’t draw his blood. She didn’t allow him past the elevators on the first floor when she kissed him good-bye in the morning. She no longer allowed him to pick her up when she was finished for the day. No one said anything further to her about her relationship with Rosenthal.

t night, in the damp chill that was Shanghai in the winter, she would meet Levinson on the street in front of the clinic at six every night when she was finished. Every night, he would kiss her on the mouth and then laugh, beaming as they walked down the sidewalk to one of the surrounding restaurants.

Soon, spring arrived. The dampness and the chill that one found even indoors in Shanghai gradually disappeared. The cherry blossoms bloomed. The heaviness of spirit that consumed people during the winter in Shanghai was lifted. Zhang Heng took longer and longer walks with Joshua Rosenthal down the Bund of the other boulevards of the city. Zhang Heng, after all this time together, was falling in love with Joshua Rosenthal. She was falling in love with him despite herself. Like all young women, she seemed to be more in love with the idea of being in love than being in love itself. But if her affections for the man seemed to be growing, his seemed to be diminishing. He didn’t laugh as much when they were together. He began to brood more. This, she first took as a reflection in the downturn of some of his business adventures. Then she wondered if it was her. She kept bringing up the matter of moving to Canada. He continued to ignore her pleas.

On a lovely evening night in May, she strolled hand in hand with Rosenthal down the Bund. He was laughing; he was joking; he seemed in a better mood than he had been for the last couple of weeks. “I saw an ad today in a nursing journal,” she said. “They’re recruiting nurses to work in the States. California to be more specific.”

“California,” he said. “Beautiful state. I love California.” They continued on strolling down the sidewalk.

“Well, seeing that ad made me wonder about us.”

“What about us?” he said smiling.

“Well, just where are we going? What’s going to happen to us?”

Rosenthal withdrew his hand from hers. He put his hands in his pockets and they continued walking along. For a few minutes he didn’t speak. Then he said, “I suppose we’ll just keep on seeing each other.”

“Josh,” she replied, “I thought you loved me.”

“InmyownwayIdo. Inmyownway,Idoloveyou.” Hewhistledafewbarsofasong she didn’t know. “I thought you loved me?”

She stopped, grabbing his arm that they were both standing there on the Bund. “I do love you, Josh. It’s just that I need a little more of a commitment? I need to know that this is all going somewhere. I want to get out of this place,” she said, stretching her right arm, swinging it across the entire horizon, as though she meant the whole of the country. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“I thought things were going fine.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I have to get out of her,” she said. “China’s killing me, it’s killing me slowly inside. I can’t explain it to you.” She looked out the window at the people who were passing on the street. “It’s just that I need to know where all this is going. I don’t want to be someone’s kept woman. I don’t want to be someone’s kept whore.”

“I’ve never once treated you that way,” he said defensively.

“No, you haven’t. But that’s what other people think.”

“Let other people think what they want to think. I never thought you gave a damn about what others thought anyway.”

“I’ve got to know where this is going?”

“You once said that I was a two-time loser. Married twice, divorced twice. I don’t plan on being a three-time loser. There’s nothing further from my mind than getting married again,” he said, neither smiling nor laughing. “If you have problems with that, I suggest you move out. I suggest you move on with your life. Go ahead, move overseas. See if life is better in the States. I plan on staying here. The future for me is China.”

single, silent tear traced its way down Heng’s cheek. “If you feel that way.”

“That’s the way I’ve always felt. I never once gave you any indication I felt otherwise. Not once have I ever told you that I wanted to settle down and get married again. If that’s what you want, you got the wrong fella.”

“Maybe, I should move out,” she said. She wiped the tear away.

“Yes, maybe you should.”

Silent tears fell again later as she packed her bags. She would keep the dresses that Rosenthal had bought for her. She would keep everything he had given her. She was sad, but she was not despondent. In her heart of hearts, she knew the relationship would come down to this. As she left, carrying her three suitcases of clothes or other personal items, Rosenthal sat in the living room of his apartment watching a DVD movie on his large screen television set. It was a Three Stooges movie that he watched every few weeks. Not looking up as she left, he giggled as one of the stooges took a pratfall. No matter how many times he had seen the movie, the pratfall always made him laugh. He didn’t say good-bye as she closed the door for the last time.

Week followed week. She once again was on her own. That summer, there was not as much precipitation in Shanghai as the previous summer. The heat was oppressive. The humidity was unbearable. The day following her departure from Rosenthal’s apartment, she pulled out her typewriter from the top shelf in her bedroom closet in her apartment. She updated it and sent it in to the recruiting company. In July, she received a letter stating that she had been accepted at one of the nursing positions in the county hospital in Bakersfield. She gave her two week’s notice to Xiao Chen and MCI. On the tenth of August, she boarded an Air China Boeing 747 for Los Angeles. From there, she would take a commuter flight to Bakersfield. Sipping a glass of red wine, she flipped through the pages of some Chinese women’s magazine. Never had she felt so alone; never had she felt so free.