the South China Morning Post which she had placed on Meng Shaowen’s table. Another forgotten grace of old Peking, the constant affectionate gift-giving.
"It is I who should serve you, when you come to my home," the old lady protested happily. The room was dark, the slatted shutters closed against the July heat. Long shadows fell over all Meng Shaowen’s accumulated treasures: the Qing dynasty embroideries in their dusty frames, the bed quilt which had come from Meng’s own mother, the luminous sparrow carved from white jade, the photos of her son, Jian; and, on Meng’s desk, the ornate old European-style clock, ticking off the days and months and years of life that still remained. Mrs. Meng shivered. Despite the summer heat she pulled her sweater closer.
"You, serve me? No, Mother Meng. And haven’t we known each other too many years to talk polite?" Alice smiled at the old lady, who was always the first person she called upon returning from any trip, always the first person she went to visit. Yet at the same moment Alice noticed how old Mrs. Meng suddenly seemed. Was it last winter, or the winter before, that Meng Shaowen’s hair had gone so white and her fingers had twisted into the tangled briars of arthritis? Or was it back when her husband died? Was it then that Mrs. Meng’s eyes, once snapping sharp through long nights of debate over the Chinese classics of literature and philosophy, had begun to rheum over?
The Chinese lady doubled forward in a raking cough. "Forgive me, girl child. Though it’s the time of heat there’s cold in my lungs."
"Nothing to forgive."
Mrs. Meng reached out and brushed a stray hair from Alice’s forehead.
Alice clasped the old woman’s hand.
"It’s my sorrow, I never had a daughter."
The words hung. But you had a son, Alice thought. Jian. And I almost married him. And if I had I’d be your daughter now.
"They have a daughter," Mrs. Meng said. "Jian and his wife."
"Yes. I know."
"Little Lihua! She’s my heart and liver!" The old woman’s face wrinkled up in fondness. Then went serious. "Of course, girl child, Jian’s wife is not like you! She is Chinese. She is not free with her mind like you foreigners. Jian once said he never knew any other woman like you. He said he could talk to you about anything."
Alice knew this was probably true. Most Chinese were educated through rigorous rote training. To even read books one had to memorize four, five thousand characters. So to a Chinese intellectual, more used to deduction than questioning, rarely presented in conversation with the unexpected, a Western woman—a smart, open-minded, sassy woman—was a marvelous companion. But only a companion. There seemed to be in the Chinese men she had known, even in Jian, the only one she had actually loved, the same hesitation she had to admit she felt within herself. They were exhilarating companions. Fantastically exciting as companions. But marriage?
"Perhaps this road is better," Mrs. Meng said gently. "It would have been hard for you and Jian. You can never be Chinese."
"Of course not," she said instantly. Yet Alice had begun to feel, during the year she was with Jian, that she had a place she belonged in the Meng family. A clan, a mother. A Chinese mother who taught her all the old techniques she herself had used to keep house during the decades of privation: how to maximize the things that were rationed and stave off hunger by using the hou men, the back door, to obtain more. Wash clothes in a bucket. Cook with a handful of coal. Buy slowly, cautiously, use the windowsill as your refrigerator in the winter.
Mrs. Meng had recited the history of the Meng family, told the names of all the ancestral souls who now dwelt beyond the Yellow Springs. Alice would always listen closely, Jian beside her, bored. Like so many modern young intellectuals he was impatient with feudal superstitions. Though he, an astute student of history, at least respected the past.
Jian. The bright, narrow black eyes, the expressive hands. Now a professor at Bei Da, Beijing University. Jian, loving her in his narrow bed in his small room, whispering to her in his musical, beautifully modulated Mandarin, of her body, its strange-feeling skin, the exotic way she walked and talked, and of his studies: the majestic tide of Chinese civilization, revolutions, upheavals, the march of legends and dynasties. Then the Khans and the Ming and the Qing and the Republicans and then