Lost in Translation Page 0,116

been together a few times, and by now felt free enough to adjust each other’s bodies with their hands and mouths. To try things.

He held her back from coming. When she was close he pulled out and lay over her, whispering in her ear in gentle, Yangtze-accented Chinese while she squirmed beneath him, alternately laughing and begging.

"All around us right now the Tengger is full of microliths," he told her. "Arrowheads, the tips of spears—men were whittling them out there ten thousand years ago. Twenty thousand. Carving stone, shells, animal bones."

"Are you trying to distract me?" she whispered, trying to maneuver her hips under him.

"No. I’m telling you something. We are fucking now in the center of the anvil." He used the crude slang, cao, fuck.

She found this departure from his usual polite speech unimaginably exciting and struggled to pull him to her. "So this was the beginning of the world?"

He laughed and pinned her hips down so she couldn’t move. "No. The world began with Gun and his son Yu. Don’t you know this? Everybody knows this. They were gods who could change into any animal they liked. The world was covered by water then. Gun and Yu had the secret of soil—earth which could contain water and dam it up"—he pushed lightly against her—"and they used the magic soil to create land masses. Do you want it, Ai-li? Do you? Then once Gun and Yu had made the earth, they gave the earth to men."

"Please!"

"Xing, " he whispered hoarsely, okay, and drove in again. He moved inside her for a minute. "Now you tell me," he said into her ear.

"What?"

"How the world began."

"In the beginning was the word—and the word was with God—then in six days—in seven days—I don’t know, Shiyang." She couldn’t do this like he could, with words, not now, not when she felt herself rising rising rising. All she knew was, the whole of China was concentrated in him, moving with him, flowing into her. "The true Chinese man," she whispered, barely audible.

He looked down at her, his breathing ragged. He was a man, just a man, what did she mean?

But she could say no more. His rhythm had reached a perfect frequency, brought him to some ultimate spot in the center of her. The great Tengger all around them, the dark room, the bed, even his face now, just above hers, swam away into darkness.

Later they lay open, waiting for a breeze, and he said: "I really do want to know."

"What? How the world began?"

"Aiya! Shuode shi ni de wenhua!" I’m talking about your culture!

She swallowed. The hot Houston nights, the radiant, space-colony skyscrapers, the forms of upthrusting light. Country music. Men in boots and hats. The bars and juke joints. Shame of her childhood. Oh, you must be Horace Mannegan’sdaughter. "I wouldn’t know where to start."

"Start here. Where are you from?"

"I told you, Texas."

"I’m saying what country are you from? Before America."

"Oh. Different ones came from different places. Ireland, Germany, England."

He looked confused. "But what do you consider yourself?"

She hesitated. "I don’t know. The truth is, I don’t really think of myself as having a culture."

"But you are American."

"Not really."

"But of course you are American," he insisted. "And you are white. Not Chinese. That’s the way of things." But he gathered her close to him as he said this, and held her protectively, as if to console her for her whiteness, her misfortune in not being Chinese. She had the sense that he forgave her all that she was. That there was a chance that she—her true self— might be acceptable to him.

Later she closed the door to her room, took out The Phenomenonof Man, and read once again the words written by Father Teilhard more than fifty years before: Nowhere either is the need more urgent of building a bridge between the two banks of our existence—the physical and the moral.... To connect the two energies, of the body and soul, in a coherent manner.... Well, then. The body and soul. The self and the other. Settle down, Mother Meng said. With a strong Chinese man.

The past was locked in behind her, barbed with mistakes. She hadn’t stood up to Horace when she should have. But that was changed now. The future was up to her.

Could she do it? Could she keep house for Lin in Zhengzhou?

She thought it over. He would probably have a two-room cinder-block apartment, companionably lined with books, but cold and at the top of endless stairs and