Lost in Translation Page 0,13
client."
"Another time," he said smoothly, concealing his disappointment. He had asked her before, always in a casual way, to go out with him and she had always refused. Interpreter Mo Ai-li was appealingly piaoliang for a foreigner: small, intelligent looking, with a face that was pretty in a neat, trim sort of way. It was also said of her that she liked Chinese yang. He had always wanted to learn for himself whether it was true or not. Even if she was a few years older.
"Zai jian, zai. jian," she said absently, stuffing the papers into her handbag. She rose and pushed through the revolving door.
"Zai jian, " he answered, watching her go, watching her carry her body with frank, hip-rolling confidence the way a Chinese woman never would. She climbed back in the taxi and it roared away.
Wu put all his supplies in order and checked the fax machine to make sure it had a fat roll of paper and was set to receive overnight. He glanced at the clock. Four fifty-five. Well. He might as well lock up. He was just removing the key from the drawer when the door hissed and a bespectacled, pinch-chested Chinese man strode in. The man took out a name card and slid it across the counter.
Wu didn’t look at it. "I’m closing," he said, still arranging things in the drawer.
"Wu Litang," the man said.
Young Wu looked up sharply. Somehow this man knew his real name, not his work name, not his school name, but the name his parents had given him at birth before his ancestors.
"Did you recognize the foreign ghost woman who was just in here?"
"No," Wu said automatically, and then glanced at the man’s card. Ice stabbed through him, not at the name—which was unimportant and undoubtedly false—but at the danwei: PLA, Beijing District Command.
"You’ve never seen her before?"
"She could have come in before," Wu evaded. "I’m not too clear. The foreigners who come in here are numerous."
"Well, Wu Litang." The man placed a delicate emphasis on his true and private given name. "Listen well. The next time she receives mail, or faxes, you are to call me at this number at once. I’ll examine them before she picks them up. And any mail for a certain other American person, an archaeologist." He leaned over and wrote out the American names on his card. "Is it clear?"
"Yes," Wu said, hating him for knowing his name and using it so rudely, hating him because he was PLA and the Six-Four at Tiananmen was so unforgivable.
"Remember," the man ordered, and walked out.
Discourteous bag of flatulence, Wu thought. As soon as he saw the man step into a waiting car and slam the door, he picked up the card and crumpled it into the wastebasket.
He would certainly inform Interpreter Mo of this the next time he saw her. Though, of course, there was no telling when that would be. Foreign clocks and calendars running as they did, differently. Inexplicably.
"This used to be called Morrison Street." Alice pointed down congested Wangfujing Boulevard. She opened her antique guidebook to the city, published sixty years before. "Something to do with a British newspaperman who lived here a hundred years ago. Now. According to the headings on Teilhard’s letters, the Jesuit House was off Morrison in Tizi Hutong. Ladder Lane." She leafed through to the index. "Ah, here. In the upper part of what used to be the Tartar City. This way."
They shouldered north through the throng. Spencer felt tired and still a little jet-lagged; it seemed that an ocean of Mandarin sucked at him in waves. But he noticed that Alice strode calmly, at home in it. She jostled easily through the surging flood of people. She ignored the vendors promoting their sweet potatoes, steamed buns, tea, and Popsicles. She stepped around the drifts of garbage on the sidewalk. Barely glanced into the shop windows teeming with cloth, clocks, cooking pots, shoes, canes, clothing, and everything in between.
And then she stopped at a dusty storefront. "I can’t believe it," she said. "Look." She took out her old guidebook. "Chang-er Bing Jia, Chang-er’s Cake House. Chang-er’s the girl in the moon, you see, or so say the Chinese." She leafed through the guidebook. "It’s still here! See? ’In business continuously since the late Ming, an acclaimed purveyor of moon-cake molds.’ People here make mooncakes every year for the Moon Festival." She pushed past him and went inside.
He followed her. A tiny room, a low ceiling, every surface