Читать книгу Across a Green Ocean - Wendy Lee - Страница 8

CHAPTER 3

Every travel website Michael Tang had looked at that summer had advised him not to go to Qinghai Province.

One of the poorest and least populated provinces in the country, where political prisoners are sent to work in labor camps.

The provincial capital typifies the worst of modern China: polluted, industrial, without aesthetic merit. You are better off going straight to Tibet.

Qinghai isn’t the armpit of China—that distinction most likely goes to Hubei—but it certainly comes close.

Still, this is his destination, as he sits on a hard sleeper train from Beijing to Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, in the northwest of China. It would have been much quicker to have taken a flight, but Michael wants to save money, and besides, he thinks that this way, he can see some of the country.

It turns out to be the most mind-numbing twenty-four hours he has ever experienced; physically numbing as well, for although the dark-green bunks are sparsely padded, they still feel like concrete to sleep on. Michael has the top bunk and feels like the main attraction in a hearse. During the day, the people who sleep on the upper bunks come down and sit on the bottom bunk, three per side, staring at one another like participants in a bad expressionist play. There are tiny hunched grandmothers, mothers holding infants, men in cheap rayon suits. People’s Liberation Army soldiers, dressed in olive-colored uniforms, sit at small tables beneath windows on the other side of the aisle, playing cards. Despite the signs that indicate no smoking, every male seems to have a lit cigarette, so the train car is filled with a faint bluish smoke that smells like burning trash.

When Michael looks at the other people on the train, he sees nothing in their faces that reminds him of himself, or his parents, or even the recent immigrants he has seen on the streets in Chinatown. Most of those immigrants are from coastal areas and not the interior of the country, but still, these seem like a difference species of people—blunt, impassive, totally devoid of hope for a better life. They are, in a word, peasants.

Dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, he realizes that he stands out as a foreigner, even if his facial features more or less resemble those of the people around him. None of the other men, even though their clothes are of poor quality, are so casually attired. Also, no one else seems to have a backpack, although many do have large, square red-and-blue-striped plastic bags stuffed with everything from melons to DVDs. Michael recognizes these bags, filled with fake designer purses and sunglasses, from the vendors on the street corners in New York City. They must be the internationally designated receptacle for pirated consumer goods.

Despite his appearance, or perhaps because of it, no one speaks to Michael. He supposes it is just as well. Like Emily, he does not know how to read or write in Chinese; unlike her, he also does not know how to speak it, although he understands some of the phrases his parents used to toss around, usually having to do with it being time to eat, time to sleep, or time to go outside. Things that a five-year-old, or a dog, might understand. Periodically, he catches someone staring at him unabashedly, as if trying to read a fortune told on his face instead of his palm. At first, Michael looks away, but when he gets tired of it, he returns the stare until the other person drops their eyes. They seem to exhibit no embarrassment in doing this, and Michael comes to understand that staring is not considered rude in this culture. He also realizes that it doesn’t mean the person is interested in whatever they are looking at. It’s just something to see, to pass the time.

There’s nowhere else to go on the train, other than the stinking latrine with its metal squat toilet. Once, Michael thought to stand in-between the cars, to try and get some fresh air, but came upon a woman holding her infant son over the gap, with his pants pulled down. She was whistling a tuneless song, and as she did so, the child began to urinate, not only into the gap but also all over the corridor. Michael turned around and went straight back to his seat.

So, still jet-lagged, he sits next to the window and looks out of it, the landscape passing by as if in a dream. It seems like days, but, in fact, has been just one since he’s left the bustle of the modern airport in Beijing, stayed overnight in a nondescript hotel, and made his way to the crowded railway station where it appeared as if refugees were trying to get on the last train out of the city, but which he suspected was simply an ordinary day in the Chinese capital.

Since then, fields of grasses topped with yellow blossoms have given way to some of the most inhospitable-looking vistas he has ever seen: slopes covered with dun-colored rock, dry riverbeds that appeared as if they have been without water for the last hundred years. Sometimes the train track runs alongside a road, upon which an ox, followed by a farmer, trudge, both so covered with dust that they are nearly indistinguishable from the ground they walk on. Mud houses the same color as the landscape appear and disappear back into their surroundings. When there are more than several houses, apparently they are enough to be considered a village, and then the train stops. People open their windows and buy packages of dry noodles, tea eggs, bottles of water, and cigarettes from the vendors outside. When they are done with their purchases, they throw the wrappers and bottles back out the window. The sides of the tracks are littered with trash, often providing the only spot of color in the otherwise monochromatic scenery.

Also, along the whitewashed mud walls, are large Chinese characters written in red, sometimes ending with an exclamation point. They look as if they are out of another time period, probably some kind of propaganda. Go back! Michael imagines them saying, in a private message just for him. This is a mistake! You won’t find what you’re looking for!

What, or rather who, Michael is hoping to find at the end of his trip is a man named Liao Weishu. This is the name signed at the end of a letter that Michael discovered among his father’s things after the funeral. At that time, he had no idea what of his father’s he should take. His mother had been so hopeful, offering old clothes that would never fit him, since he was taller and skinnier than his father had been; or accessories, such as cufflinks and tiepins, that could only be worn ironically. He recognized a navy-blue suit jacket that was the only one he remembered his father ever wearing, the collar stiff with hair oil, and the lining in the armpits discolored from perspiration. The jacket was so narrow that Michael imagined anyone who wore it must have perpetually hunched shoulders, constricted by fabric as well as other things.

Finally, he asked to go through his father’s papers and chanced upon the one item that didn’t look like it was some kind of financial document (these he’d leave to Emily to sort out): an envelope that was addressed to his father. The postmark indicated it had been sent about a month before his father’s death, from someplace in China that he had never heard of and didn’t think he knew how to pronounce. Then his mother had come into the room, and he had put the letter in his pants pocket, where it stayed unopened for another nine months. Sometimes he would think about it, and be satisfied enough to simply know it was there, and then he forgot about it altogether. The only reason he’d rediscovered the letter that following June was because David had wanted Michael to go with him to the wedding of one of his closest female friends. Michael had taken out his sole good pair of pants and had come across the letter again.

Unfortunately, it was written in Chinese, except for one sentence toward the end of the letter—Everything has been forgiven—in neat but spiky handwriting, as if a crab had crawled over the page. Michael wondered if his father had racked up some kind of debt. He could ask his mother to translate, but that would bring up questions and uncomfortable memories. So instead he put an ad online for a translator, and it was answered by someone named Edison Ng, whom he arranged to meet at a coffee shop downtown. At first, he was skeptical of this skinny college kid wearing a backward baseball cap, but Edison assured him that he was fluent in both languages and could translate the letter for fifty dollars by the end of the week.

“Heavy stuff, right?” Edison commented after he’d delivered the translation. “Who do you think this Liao Weishu guy is?”

Michael was still trying to digest its contents. “Other than a friend of my father’s, I don’t know.”

“For another fifty bucks I can track him down for you online. . . .”

Michael had to admire the kid’s entrepreneurial drive. “Thanks, but I think this requires more than an Internet search. I’m going to have to go to China to find him.”

As soon as Michael spoke those words, it seemed like the most logical solution in the world. Of course he had to go to China and meet this Liao Weishu. Liao did not know that his father had passed away, and it was up to Michael to break the news to him. You didn’t write someone after forty years and just receive a letter in return. No, a personal visit was in order. Without telling anyone, he applied for a visa.

He wasn’t running away, Michael assured himself. Although there were other, very good reasons for him to get out of the city. The heat, which made his apartment feel crappier than usual. The fact that the lease on his apartment would soon be up, and he might not be able to afford to renew it. His inability to find a new job—no one wanted a graphic designer who had once accidentally turned in a report with rude drawings doodled in the corners. That it would soon be a year since his father died, and his mother would probably want him to come home and commemorate it somehow. He imagined what it would be like—an uncomfortable dinner at home with Emily, who would be preoccupied with her latest case; and Julian, who would hover awkwardly on the periphery; and his mother, who would try to fill the silence with chatter, answering questions no one asked. Also, there was David. By that time, he and Michael would have known each other for around ten months, on and off, but if you counted the times they were on, it would only be around seven months. Not that anyone was counting.

After Michael found out what the letter had said, he told David that he had changed his mind about accompanying him to the wedding of his friend, Laurel.

“I don’t understand,” David said. “You have female friends too. Like that girl who lived next door, Annie.”

“Amy. And we never dated.”

Michael found it amusing that in high school, David had played straight, captaining a couple of sports teams and dating the daughter of one of the oldest families in town. Laurel’s wedding was on the grounds of an organic farm, and Michael was sure he would be the only Asian person in attendance, aside from a couple of trophy girlfriends. Or maybe he would be the trophy boyfriend.

“This isn’t what I signed up for,” he told David. “Being your plus one.”

“Fine,” David said. “But you’ll be missing out on some amazing grass-fed beef. Or is it free-range beef? Anyway, you know, beef that’s so fresh it talks back to you.” His tone was playful, but clearly he was troubled by Michael’s reluctance to be considered a couple.

Therefore, David went alone to the wedding, which took place on a beautifully sunny day in late June, a day on which Michael stayed inside his crappy apartment and only ventured outside in the evening to get something to eat. When he came back, David was waiting for him, sitting on the top step underneath the skylight that was plastered darkly with pigeon droppings.

“How was it?” Michael asked.

“Wholesome and bourgeois,” David said. Then, after a pause, “If you were there, we could have made fun of the flower arrangements. Fucking modernist sculptures, they were.”

“I missed you, too,” Michael admitted, before realizing a moment later that David had not actually said that he’d missed him.

But it didn’t matter, because then they were kissing, and somehow Michael managed to unlock his door, and they moved as if in a choreographed dance the few feet across the room from the door to the futon that David always swore he would catch something from, and things were all right again.

That is, until a few weeks later, when David suggested Michael move in with him. By that time Michael had received his visa and was close to maxing out his credit card after purchasing a plane ticket, among other travel preparations. It was almost too easy to become upset at David and accuse him of things that were only partially true, before storming out of David’s apartment and ignoring his calls. This way he didn’t have to tell David anything about what he was intending to do, to explain himself when he didn’t even know why he was taking this trip.

Michael realizes, though, as the train winds its way through the plateaus of northwestern China, this trip has everything to do with David Wheeler, and it was set in motion over a year before.

That summer morning, Michael had made plans to meet a friend at a restaurant in Chelsea, a place that guaranteed a wait of about an hour, followed by awful service. Thus, he was already not in a very good mood when he came to Fifth Avenue and found his way blocked by hordes of shirtless young men, cheering on a street full of more shirtless young men elevated in gaudily decorated floats. He had forgotten about the Gay Pride Parade.

Normally, Michael scorned this kind of event. Was there really a need to emphasize your otherness, to flaunt it in other people’s faces? He had spent so much of his life hiding—hiding where his parents had come from in high school, hiding his boring suburban upbringing in college, hiding his lack of corporate ambition at work—that it was second nature to hide a less visible aspect of himself as well.

After struggling through the crowd for several minutes, he couldn’t find a way to cross the street. He gave up and was about to call his friend to cancel when he heard a voice behind him say, “This sucks, doesn’t it?”

Michael turned to see a young man, somewhat preppy-looking in a polo shirt and khaki pants, blond hair gleaming in the sun. “It does,” he replied. “I’m supposed to meet someone on Seventh Avenue, but I guess I won’t make it.”

“Me too,” the man said. “But I’m getting hungry. You want to grab a bite on this side of the street?”

Michael only looked at him for a few more seconds before agreeing. He wondered how long this man had been following him before picking him out among so many fine, shirtless specimens. It felt good to have been chosen.

Over lunch, at a fancy place he’d walked by many times but had never gone into, he found out that David was a lawyer and had grown up in Connecticut, and that his father, now retired, had also been a lawyer. Michael didn’t say anything about his family, not even his sister’s profession (Emily’s work was such that he didn’t think she and David were of the same tribe). By the end, when David took out his wallet, Michael let him pay.

On the street outside, when David turned to him, Michael expected him to say he’d had a good time, maybe even suggest that they do it again sometime. Instead, David said, “You want to go back to my place?”

In the cab, Michael reflected that this wasn’t so different from a normal hookup, of which he’d had a few—in college, when it had been new and exhilarating, and then after he’d moved to the city, where it seemed like a cliché. It was a bit strange, though, to be doing it not after an evening of drinking, to be seeing the other person’s face clearly, to be removing your clothes in the light rather than the dark. It was stranger still to wake up in that other person’s apartment, not in the middle of the night or in the grainy regret of morning, but with late-afternoon sunshine stippling both your naked bodies.

David was still sleeping, and Michael looked at him more closely. Without his glasses, his face looked younger, and he slept with one hand curled under his cheek, like a child. His body was long and concave in the middle, where the smattering of fair hair on his chest turned thicker and curlier. His penis was somewhat unremarkable, except for how quickly it had lengthened in Michael’s hand; now it was curled up against the inside of his thigh like a snail.

Michael got up to get a drink of water, but it was really a pretext to examine the rest of the situation he had found himself in. The apartment was several times the size of his own, and appointed sparsely with modern-looking furniture. What looked like actual art, rather than prints, hung on the walls. More significantly, the place looked like it belonged to an adult, an adult with money. At twenty-five, Michael was still used to secondhand furniture and multiple roommates, buying expired items and day-old bread from the grocery store in order to make the next rent check. He had only just started living without a roommate, because more than one person in the space in which he lived would be considered a fire hazard.

When he opened David’s refrigerator, he found little food, but a great deal of condiments and individual glass bottles of sparkling water. He opened one of the bottles and took it back into the bedroom, where David was awake and smiling lazily at him. Without asking, David took the bottle from him and drank long and hard. It struck Michael as a more intimate act than any of the ones they had experienced with each other.

In the month that followed, he found himself spending most nights with David, or on rare occasions, if they were downtown, back at Michael’s place. At first, Michael was ashamed of his apartment, its cramped size and lack of air-conditioning, the unscrub-bable stains in the bathroom. There was nowhere to sit except on the frameless futon, as if it were a life raft. So, they usually ended up at David’s, and if Michael came over early, he’d hang out in the bar next door, because he didn’t have a key to David’s place and he thought the doorman looked at him funny.

One day, Michael had just finished sucking David off, David’s taste still in the back of his mouth, when his cell phone rang. He wasn’t going to pick up, but he saw that it was Emily. Clearing his throat, he answered. Her voice was strangely calm, as if she were reporting something that had happened in another country. Although he comprehended what she was saying, his eyes were fixated on his own hand, lying on David’s hipbone, like a long, pale lizard. It was impossible that in one moment he should feel so complete, and then in the next, absolutely empty.

Without telling David what was wrong, he dressed and left the apartment, walked twenty blocks downtown in a daze before remembering he had told Emily that he would meet her at the train station. That night, at his mother’s house, after his mother and sister had gone to sleep, he finally called David to tell him what had happened. He did not say he would see David when he got back. As if an outsider to the situation, he listened to David struggle to find the right words to say and give up, a pattern that he would later recognize with other friends, coworkers, and people he didn’t know at his father’s funeral.

After ending the call with David, Michael sat in his old bedroom, still trying to feel something. He thought of his mother and sister in their own rooms, the efficient walls of silence that surrounded them all. Finally, he was able to dredge up an old hurt that had long since scabbed over but would twinge if he prodded it hard enough. It was much easier to feel anger at his father, and something his father had done years ago, than at the randomness of his father’s death.

Michael had seen his father two weekends earlier, one of the rare times he’d gone back home that summer—partly to escape the heat in the city and partly to get some perspective on his relationship with David, which was turning out to be much more intense than he’d expected. At the time, David’s closeness had been part of everything that had felt too close about the city; simply another thing that he needed to get away from. His father had been his usual taciturn self, glowering over something as minor as a creaky door hinge or a dead patch of grass on the lawn. He’d also been particularly concerned about a crape myrtle tree in the backyard that had caught a disease and had consequently lost all of its leaves, appearing as though it were in the dead of winter. Michael’s father talked to him about what to do with the tree and finally announced he was going to cut it down; Michael had agreed. That was the essence of the last, illuminating conversation he had with his father.

At the funeral, since he didn’t speak Chinese, most of the people there bypassed him. Emily seemed to be handling everything in her usual, capable manner, and he felt unnecessary, like an uninvited guest. So instead he snuck away early on with Amy Bradley, who had come in from Boston, where she attended design school. They went out and sat on the back porch.

“How’re you holding up?” Amy asked.

“Could be better,” Michael replied. “Any chance you got a cigarette on you?”

Amy grinned. “I have something better.” She extracted a neatly rolled joint from her pocket. “I thought you might need this.”

For a moment, Michael hesitated, knowing it wouldn’t look good if he were caught smoking pot at his father’s funeral. What would his mother think? But what the hell—next to Emily, he looked like a delinquent, anyway.

Passing the joint back and forth reminded him of when he and Amy were teenagers, parked in the woods in her parents’ car, or up in her room. They spent afternoons at her house with pads of heavy Manila paper, Amy sketching clothing designs and Michael sketching her as she sketched. She was already into fashion then, making clothes on her own sewing machine and using Michael as a dress form. You make the perfect model, she gushed, which he interpreted to mean that he had the figure of an anorexic, prepubescent girl, and wasn’t sure if he should take it as a compliment or not. Still, he stood motionless for hours as she pinned and re-pinned.

You would not have known Amy was talented in that arena from the way she dressed at school: torn black shirts, ripped black jeans, boots that looked like she would kick someone’s head in if they looked at her wrong. She convinced Michael to join her in a social experiment, in which they wore their clothes inside out for a week. No one noticed, which Amy said was the whole point. When Amy cut her hair and dyed it black, people said they looked like twins, which they did not bother to dignify with an answer. Aside from the fact that Amy wasn’t Chinese, she was short and her body full of curves that she tried to hide beneath her shapeless dark outfits. She decreed that she and Michael should kiss each other on the cheek, twice, whenever they ran into each other in the halls (So European, Amy had said). No one seemed to notice that either.

Early in their junior year in high school, Michael discovered that Amy was in love with him. She had kissed him on the mouth one night, when her parents were out and they’d broken into her father’s liquor cabinet. One moment they’d been laughing about Courtney Snell’s ridiculous answer in social studies class (“Where do Chicanos come from, Courtney?” “Um, Chicago?”), and then Amy pressed her lips so fleetingly to his that he thought he had imagined it.

“Did you feel anything?” Amy asked hopefully.

Michael shook his head, although he had felt something, besides the burn of bourbon from Amy’s lips. What he had felt was disappointment. He had been disappointed that it had been Amy who had kissed him, not Peter Lawrence, the slender, brown-haired boy who sat in front of him in math class and smelled not only like gym socks, but something that made his very skin tingle. The other time he’d felt that sensation, like an itch somewhere that couldn’t be scratched, was when he was twelve and had been spying over the fence next door. Scott Bradley, Amy’s brother, who was Emily’s age, was swimming in the pool. His body looked long and tantalizing beneath the surface, the points of his shoulder blades glinting through the water. Just then Michael’s father, coming home from work, saw Michael at the top of the fence—although not what he was looking at—and yelled at him for doing something so dangerous. Michael had jumped down from the fence, twisting his ankle in the process.

After the kissing fiasco, Amy became obsessed with boys at school who would prove to be just as unattainable: guys who had girlfriends, jocks who would never look twice at her. Michael would accompany her to dances where she’d hope to steal some boy away from his date, but it would go off badly, and she’d drink too much spiked punch, and the evening would end with her in the girls’ room, throwing up, with Michael holding back her hair. Why are you so nice to me? she’d say in between sobs. Because I can’t be anything else to you, he’d wanted to reply.

Amy was the only person from that part of his life who knew he was gay. She’d known from that night when he was sixteen, when he’d had nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to. She hadn’t treated him any differently since then, except to get a little jealous of the female friends he made when he went away to college; especially Shannon Krist, whom he’d brought home once, even though he told her that Shannon thought she might be a lesbian. Over the years, Amy grew into herself, letting her hair return to its regular strawberry blond, although it was still spiky and short; keeping only a few tasteful piercings; dressing in her own geometric, angular designs that would cause people to stop her in the street and ask her where she bought her clothes.

Now, Amy asked, her eyes half-lidded from the pot, “Do you wish you’d ever talked to your father about what happened that night?”

“That was almost ten years ago. He probably forgot about it.”

“But you haven’t.”

“Doesn’t make any difference. Maybe it wouldn’t have if I’d reminded him while he was around. He would never have admitted that what he said was wrong.”

“But it was wrong.”

Michael shrugged. “Not in his mind it wasn’t. I’m sure he’s said a lot worse. Done a lot worse, too, but that’s beside the point.”

“Do you think you’ll ever tell your mom and sister?”

“Which part of it?”

“All of it.”

He sighed. “Not right now. They have too much to deal with.”

After a pause, Amy said, “I’m seeing someone. Don’t judge. He’s one of my teachers and—don’t judge—he says I have a lot of talent. What do you think?”

“I think,” Michael said, “that you’re still going after the wrong men.”

“That’s probably true.”

“I’m seeing someone too. His name is David. He pays for everything.”

Amy arched a brow. “So you feel like a kept woman?”

“I don’t know how I feel about it. Sometimes I think things are going well, and I don’t know how I lucked out, and other times I feel like something bad is going to happen. Like this.”

Amy said softly, “Your father didn’t die because you were enjoying yourself with a man.”

Michael considered this for a moment. Amy spoke so plainly, with such conviction, yet he couldn’t quite disassociate what Emily had told him over the phone a few days ago with the feeling of David’s skin, the salty essence of him.

“I think I’m going to break up with David when I get back,” he said.

“You do that,” Amy replied. “Maybe I’ll break up with my guy too.”

They looked at each other, as if daring the other to look away first, and then started laughing. Both of them knew that this was easier said than done.

Michael left Amy on the porch and went upstairs to use the bathroom. He was passing his sister’s bedroom door, which was slightly open, when he saw something inside that made him pause: Emily and Julian, going at it like horny teenagers. He stepped away, and then chuckled to himself. So Emily wasn’t that perfectly behaved after all.

After he got back to the city, he did break up with David. Then he couldn’t stay away, and they got back together. This pattern repeated itself over the following year, with little variation. When they were apart, Michael didn’t call for days, went out with other friends. During this time, he imagined David sitting in his tasteful apartment, sipping his mineral water, alone. David gave Michael expensive presents for his birthday and the holidays. Michael gave David nothing, unless you counted grief.

It was pretty childish behavior, he had to admit. It was as if by not committing to David, he didn’t have to tell his mother and sister he was dating anyone, or that he was gay. He wasn’t even sure if it mattered now. The person in his family who would have been most upset by it would have been his father, who was gone; and besides, his father already knew he was gay, had known for years, even if he didn’t care to acknowledge it. But Michael had spent so long acting this way, it was as if he didn’t know how else to be. If he cared to admit more, there were things he resented about David, the least being that everything seemed to have come so easily to him, especially when it came to his identity. Well, there had been that incident with his high-school girlfriend, Laurel, but the fact that she had invited David to her wedding said something about how easy it was to forgive him. He was on good terms with his parents and his younger brother, and he doted on his twin three-year-old nephews. He had been in several long-term relationships, all which had ended amicably, and he had never been desperate enough to pick someone off the street, before Michael. And even then, with his luck, Michael had gone right along with him.

David didn’t make things easy, though. Passive aggressive, Michael thought. At the same time as David allowed Michael his space, he also insisted Michael give him a key to his apartment, in case Michael were locked out or something happened to him (yeah, right). Michael finally made him a spare key in order to shut him up, but refused to accept one to David’s apartment. He was afraid of how easy it would be to stay there when David was away, and what that would lead to.

David’s suggestion that they move in together came about quite innocently. It was on one of those late-summer evenings that had cooled down enough that they’d dared to open the windows, and sounds from the street below drifted in on the balmy air: murmurings from the bar next door, the distant wail of a siren. David lived in a neighborhood that seemed designed for young professionals with too little time to spend in their apartments and too much money to spend on food and drink. Although only a few dozen blocks away from where Michael lived, it might as well be in a different city. But, Michael reflected, this was the kind of life someone his age, or a little older, was supposed to live. And with someone like David.

He turned away from the window to see David holding out a glittering object in the palm of his hand.

“I made you a key,” David said.

“I don’t want a key. I don’t want to be coming in and out all the time. Your doorman gives me enough suspicious looks as it is, like I’m a stranger.”

“But you wouldn’t be. Not if you lived here.”

“Who says I want to live here?”

David laughed. “Come on. That place you live in is a dump. You need a tetanus shot to use the shower. Besides, didn’t you say that your lease was up soon and your landlord was going to raise the rent? You can’t afford that.”

“How do you know what I can afford?”

“You know what I mean. You could live here for free. That is, until you find a new job.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? So that I’d be completely dependent on you for everything?”

David paused. “I wasn’t aware you depended on me for anything.”

“Well, I don’t want anything from you,” Michael told him. “Not your charity, and not your money, and definitely not your key.”

It was almost as if he were watching himself get up, walk past David and his still-outstretched hand, and out the door. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he took the stairs, and each step jolted him back into his own body, so that by the time he got to the lobby, he was aware of how theatrical he was being. He walked past the doorman, who always seemed to have a smirk in the corner of his mouth when he saw Michael and David together, and managed to exit the building before his cell phone rang for the first time.

Outside, people spilled out from the bar and onto the sidewalk, young men with their collars unbuttoned, young women barely able to stand erect after a day in heels. Still, no one wanted to go home, because that would mean being alone. Looking at these beautiful young people, Michael felt a sense of relief—comfort, even—in the knowledge that life was proceeding as it should; unattached, free.

There were three messages from David on his phone by the time Michael got back home, as well as a hang up from his mother. Briefly, he wondered what she wanted to talk to him about, but concluded that whatever it was, it couldn’t be that serious. He hadn’t spoken to his mother since he had lost his job a month earlier, afraid that she’d ask questions, offer to send him money, or even worse, suggest that he move home. Plus, he didn’t want to have to relive that morning when his boss called him into his office to tell him that he’d been laid off. Although he’d been expecting it for weeks, and never cared very much for his work or the people he worked with, he had still felt an inexplicable void. Now he understood why people called both losing a job and a death in the family life-altering events. Maybe the trip he was about to take would be life altering as well.

So, ignoring the calls from both David and his mother, Michael put some things in a backpack. There wasn’t much—some clothes and toiletries, and, of course, Liao Weishu’s letter and its translation. He had an early morning flight to Beijing to catch. In a fit of conscience, he wrote a hasty note and left it on the table. He figured that after not hearing from him for a while, David would come over and use his key to get into his apartment, and he didn’t want David to think the worst about him. Michael was already doing a good job of that himself.

The train finally pulls into the station in Xining, Qinghai Province, the morning of Michael’s third day in China, to the strain of schmaltzy elevator music that comes on overhead at every stop. Michael slings his backpack over his shoulder and disembarks, whereupon he is beset by a dozen or so hotel touts, shouting things at him in Chinese. When that doesn’t work, they switch to Japanese.

“Hotel?” Michael says in English.

“Hotel!” one of the men replies, and Michael goes with him.

He gets into a red taxi while the driver continues to chatter at him in English, some of which makes sense. Michael gathers that the man is telling him about the tourist attractions in the city and its environs, including something that sounds like a big lake. At least he remembers seeing a lake on one of the travel websites, which advised him that it isn’t worth visiting.

The taxi stops in front of what must be the grandest hotel in town, a concrete square with an automatic glass door. Behind the front desk is a row of clocks and their corresponding times in international cities, in an imitation of a more cosmopolitan place, except Losangeles and Saopaulo are single words. The clerk stammers when Michael speaks to him in English. Michael obtains a hotel room for the equivalent of twenty US dollars. He paid the taxi driver two dollars.

“Should I put my passport in your safe?” he asks the hotel clerk, remembering something he read on a travel website.

“No need,” the clerk says. “No minorities here.”

“Excuse me?” Michael wonders if he has heard correctly, or if something has been missed in the translation.

“No Uighur people here.”

Michael has no idea what kind of people that means, but goes along with it.

His room is decent enough, with a Western-style toilet and a washcloth the size and texture of a paper towel. Michael lies down on the scratchy orange coverlet on the bed. It’s marginally softer than the hard seat of the train, but, for the first time since he’s left Beijing, he is totally, blessedly, alone. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, several hours have passed and it is already afternoon.

Downstairs, he finds the clerk who speaks English and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to the normal university?”

If the clerk is surprised that Michael wants to go there rather than one of the usual tourist attractions, he doesn’t show it. He marks the location on a map, and since it looks like a straight shot north, Michael decides to walk there and see if his first impression of the city will be changed any. It isn’t. The heat has dissipated somewhat, but there is still a haze over everything. Even the leaves on the trees appear to be covered with a light film of dust. Rising in the background, barely visible through the pollution, are the outlines of mountains.

He walks by buildings that look like they have been recently constructed, or at least in the last fifty years: gray Soviet-style apartment blocks, stores fronted by blue glass, buildings covered in white tile, as if the entire outdoors were a bathroom. At the same time, amid the trucks and motorcycles, donkeys pull carts down the street. Michael spies a group of men waiting at a bus stop, looking unlike anyone he’s seen in China until now. They’re wearing robes peeled down over their torsos, with the sleeves tied around their waists, their faces flat and chiseled, the color of beef jerky. He realizes they must be Tibetans. He’s definitely not in the China he’d imagined, a land of rice paddies, where everyone is either a farmer or a Communist cadre, or both.

As the sun appears to be poised directly overhead, Michael realizes he hasn’t eaten that day. Not wanting to stop, and not feeling confident enough to enter one of the stores, he buys an ice cream bar from a cart. The shrewd vendor gives him one look and charges him as much as his taxi ride, but Michael doesn’t have the language or the inclination to argue. He figures that two dollars are what he’d pay for a bad ice cream back in the States. Then he looks around and realizes something else that has given him away as a foreigner: The only people eating ice cream at this time of day are children. They are also, he thinks, looking down at his own bare legs, the only ones who are wearing shorts. Being in China so far has made him feel like a large baby, unable to express himself, eating the wrong foods, wearing inappropriate clothes.

Uncannily, Michael feels someone staring at him. Standing in front of him is a dirty-faced, bare-footed child, tattered clothes hanging off a skinny frame that indicates he’s probably older than he looks. The child points at the ice cream and then at his mouth. Michael isn’t used to beggars like this—panhandlers on New York streets, sure, but there is something about this boy that strikes him as more depressing. He hesitates, but then decides this isn’t his country, or his problem. He shakes his head and turns his attention back to his ice cream, but before he can take a bite, the child shoots out a hand and plunges two grimy fingers into the ice cream bar so that it crumples into a sticky mess before he runs away.

Michael stares at the smashed ice cream, not quite sure what has just happened. Did that kid decide that if Michael wasn’t going to give him his ice cream, then no one was going to have it? Was he even capable of such a devious thought? Shaking his head in disgust, though he isn’t sure whether it is at himself or the child, Michael throws the dirty ice cream into the gutter. He isn’t sure what kind of welcome this is, but he forces himself to move past it.

Thankfully, the farther he progresses down the street, the more pleasant it becomes, bordered by trees that are still spindly and stunted and dusty, but there are more of them, so they create some shade. Finally, on his right, are two open gates, signaling an institution of some kind. Just beyond, surrounded by a scraggly flower bed, is a statue of Mao with his right hand held up, as if in a benediction. Unlike other statues of Mao that Michael has seen in history books—where they’re located in squares and parks—this version is only one and a half times the size of a regular person, and not as intimidating.

Michael checks the lettering over the gate against the characters the hotel clerk thoughtfully wrote down for him, and after confirming that this is indeed the normal university, walks in under Mao’s watchful eye. Since he can’t read any of the signs, he asks two female students where the English department is. One of them giggles and hides behind her textbook, but the other, bolder one, who appears to understand some English, points out a building to the left. Fortunately, it is not a large campus.

The severe-looking woman sitting behind the desk in the concrete-floored office gives a single nod when Michael asks her if she speaks English.

“Professor Liao does not teach here anymore,” she responds to his query.

“But I have this letter. . . .” Michael holds it out to her as if in proof.

She coolly turns it over in her hands and taps the postmark. “It is an old letter. Sent over a year ago.”

“Does he have a forwarding address?” Michael asks, desperate.

The woman shrugs. “I am sorry.”

She looks at a spot in the distance behind his head, and Michael guesses that he has taken up enough of her time, although no one else appears to be in need of her attention. There’s nothing else he can do but turn around and leave the building.

He sits down on a stone bench, still holding the letter, wondering what his next step should be. He can’t believe that his journey might end here. There has to be someone on campus who knows where Liao Weishu has gone, but the odds of Michael finding that person, especially without knowing the language, is slim. Maybe the clerk back at the hotel can help him. Is there some kind of Chinese White Pages?

He’s just about to stand when a soft voice calls out to him, “Hello!”

He looks up to see a girl in a blue-and-white gym uniform. She appears to be about twelve years old, although he guesses she must be a college student.

“You are looking for Professor Liao?” she asks. “I hear you talking to Miss Wang in the office.”

“Yes, she said he doesn’t work here anymore?”

“He is—retired.” The girl looks proud for remembering how to say that word in English.

Michael leans forward so eagerly that she takes an involuntary step back. “Do you know where he is?”

She nods. “He lives on campus.”

“Can you take me there?” Her startled look makes him think he’s said something inappropriate, so he quickly amends, “I mean, can you deliver a message to him from me?”

The girl looks much more comfortable with that idea. Michael hastily scribbles a note with the name of his hotel. “It’s okay,” he assures her. “I’m an old friend.” Or at least my father was. After he hands over the note, he grins. “I guess Miss Wang thinks I look dangerous.”