Lost in Translation Page 0,17

the Warlords and finally, as if in a last gasp of Luanshi, Chaos, before the Communists nailed things down strangling tight, the rampaging Japanese. He had taught her that China’s power lay in its endurance, its shoudeliao.

Jian. So open minded about some things. He knew he was not her first man but he never asked her to explain. Then, after a year he asked her, awkward and limpid at once, if she would come with him to his superiors at the danwei and "talk about love." Marriage! She said she needed to think about it. She knew instantly, sinkingly, that Horace would ruin it. He would wage some kind of war that would force her and Jian apart. And that was exactly what happened.

And since then no man seemed to be what she wanted.

"Yes," she said haltingly to Mother Meng now, "I often think back and forth on it. If not for Horace, Jian and I would have married."

"It’s a bad road for you. Your baba forbade you." Meng used the familiar, intimate word for father even though Alice always referred to her father only by his first name. "And the blood and the flesh can never be untied. Isn’t it so? But, girl child"—Meng lowered her voice—"listen to me. How old are you now?"

"Thirty-six."

Mrs. Meng shook her head. "Eh. Too pitiable! How can one tell how old a foreigner is? So you can no longer bear children."

"But in America, Mother, lots of women—"

"Ai-li." Meng drew her closer. "Children are for young women with strong bodies and innocent hearts. As you get older you eat too much bitterness. There’s a legend, you know. It’s like this. When you die you approach the Yellow Springs. Old Woman Wang waits for you there with the wine of forgetfulness. You drink this wine, you forget the life you’ve just finished. You are pure for the next life. You are yourself. And while you’re still young this self is true—because all the memories, the pain, the burdens, have not started to come back to you yet."

"What do you mean, come back to you? Doesn’t the wine erase everything?"

"By the last dynasty, people were burying the dead with cups that had holes in them." A smile touched at Mrs. Meng’s thin, corrugated mouth. "Old Woman Wang didn’t mind if you brought your own cup."

Alice laughed.

"At the time of your death you can choose, do you understand me or not? Leave it behind, or carry it forward."

Alice nodded.

"Don’t carry it forward. Ai-li. Listen to your old mother. Find a man. You mustn’t live without the yang. It crosses the rule of nature."

Alice nodded. She’d heard this before. As if I can just do it, she thought. Just pluck a rare, intelligent man, with kindness and room in his heart, out of the air. I wait. I look. And in the meantime, do I live without the yang? No. I allow myself to have a little.

"A strong man," Mrs. Meng was advising. "Maybe a Chinese man. You are older now."

Alice moved into the old woman’s embrace, rested her head on the narrow chest. She felt the frail arms go around her. How could she have survived without the old lady’s love? "I’ll try. I fear I won’t succeed."

"Narde hua," Nonsense. Mrs. Meng touched Alice’s cheek. "But don’t let too many more seasons pass," she whispered into the red hair.

Alice laid her things out ceremoniously on the desk in her hotel room. Her "four treasures": brush, ink, inkstone, and paper. Today for paper she had a small piece of xuanzhi, the expensive handmade sheets one could still buy in certain shops here in the capital. She dripped a little water into the inkstone and rubbed the ink stick in the puddle until she had the right viscosity. In this she twirled the brush.

She looked at the exquisite, rough-textured rice paper. On paper such as this one should write poetry. Living, moving ideograms, their various meanings touching infinite shades of possibility.

Instead Alice found herself drawing the name Yulian with the brush—the name she had been using lately at night. First the radical for the moon, then the ear radical which brought in the notion of happiness through the senses and made it into yu, fragrant. Then lian, lotus, with the flower radical on top and combining below the sound, lian, with the symbol for cart or car, originally connoting the name of a related flower in Chinese. Lotus. Fragrant Lotus.

She looked at it, blinking.

She’d used other names in the