Lost in Translation Page 0,44

out, crossing the courtyard between the buildings, to emerge finally from the front door of the Number One complex. There Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin were sitting on the steps. "Zenmoyang?" she said politely, and sat beside them.

"I must compliment you," Kong remarked. "Your Chinese is very standard."

"Guojiang, " she demurred, and then pointed to a small black machine wrapped in its cord on the cement step. "What’s that?"

"My fax." Dr. Kong raised his narrow hands in despair. "I need a line for it, and the hotel cannot spare one. Is it not unthinkable? A hotel in this modern age without extra phone lines..." He shook his head.

"He loves that fax." Dr. Lin laughed. "He got it on a trip to Japan last year. Now he takes it everywhere."

"No extra lines. Really, I had no idea this place would be so tu."

Alice smiled. Tu, hick or rustic, carried a veiled insult. Most urban Chinese looked down on rural Chinese. "It is pretty tu out here," she conceded.

"Regrettable," sniffed Kong, and picked up the machine. "In Zhengzhou this would never happen."

"Nor in Beijing," Alice said. "But does not progress have its price? Every time I go out it seems I see some lovely old neighborhood torn down, and in its place a new concrete building."

"Yes," Kong said, "but they are beautiful. They are modern. Life in those narrow alleys in Beijing is—is"—he searched for the word—"unhygienic." He thought about his visit to the vice director’s Beijing home, just a few days before, in just such a hutong. True, his cousin’s courtyard house retained a certain feudal charm. But the smoke from the cook shed! The dogs running free! And worst of all, the primitive bathroom, no more than a tiled trough on the floor through which water gurgled. "You see, Interpreter Mo, we Chinese are most anxious to leave those primitive conditions and move into modern housing."

"Not me," she said. "I like the hutong houses better." She glanced at Dr. Lin.

"I feel the same way," Lin said, speaking to Kong but smiling at Alice. "I like the old courtyard homes."

"When they disappear a part of old China will be gone forever."

"Exactly."

Kong rolled his eyes. "The past is the past. Anyway. I’m going to the Bureau of Cultural Relics. They’ll have an extra phone line for me."

"The Bureau of Cultural Relics?" Alice asked.

"The office in charge of archaeology for all of Ningxia. They run the historical museums too." Kong hoisted his fax machine. "Zai jian."

"And what are you going to do?" Lin asked her as Kong walked out the gate.

"I thought I’d look around the town."

"I noticed a place around the corner that rents bicycles," he said carefully. "Would the foreign woman want to get a bicycle and sightsee with me?"

"Yes, I would, but if you continue to call me ’the foreign woman’ I might have to curse your ancestors for eight generations."

He laughed. " ’Interpreter Mo,’ then?"

"That’s at least a little better." She knew she could not ask him to call her ’Alice’ or ’Ai-li’; given names were only for intimate use in China. Mostly, people addressed each other by title. She didn’t mind. There was a certain security in it. One always knew where one was, in the group. Is this my group? she thought for the thousandth time. China. The Chinese.

"Better wait here," Lin advised. "I’ll go rent the bicycles. If the old man sees you are a foreigner he’ll want a huge deposit from you—a hundred yuan, say, or your passport."

"Oh." While he went around the corner she studied the old Chinese Muslim women behind their yogurt stands. They sat in their wide cotton trousers behind the rickety little tables, waving flies away from crude paper-covered crocks of yogurt. As she watched them she felt her heart pounding pleasantly. Did Lin feel the same flutter of affinity she did? Of course he does, she thought, he must. If experience had taught her anything it was that when she felt it, the other person felt it too.

Riding up Sun Yat-sen Boulevard, the main street and biggest commercial center for nearly a thousand miles of desert, Alice saw an endless stream of functional, Eastern-Bloc cement buildings. Everywhere were majestic signs in Chinese characters and Mongolian script, announcing the Number Three Light Industrial Store, the Municipal Committee for Liaison with the Minority Peoples Subheadquarters, the Hua Feng Institute for the Training of Herbal Medicine, and the Number Eight People’s Clinic.

The streets were not crowded—at least not by Beijing or Shanghai standards.