Lost in Translation Page 0,45

They passed a few carts, an occasional car. There were no streetlights and pedestrians ambled in all random directions, hardly seeming to notice the distinction between street and sidewalk.

They paused at the West Gate Tower, which now kept only a silent, symbolic watch over the streets. She recalled one of Teilhard’s letters; he had written about standing at this West Gate of the city in 1923, looking down the long dirt road to Tibet. Tartary, he had called this place. A bygone word now. Tartary. She looked at Lin from the corner of her eye. Maybe the kind of word he would like.

"Shall we turn?" he asked.

"Sure."

They swung to the left. The road out of town was just a continuation of Serve-the-Nation Boulevard, a two-lane blacktop lined with noodle stalls and barbershops. As they pedaled west on Serve-the-Nation this crumbled into animal pens and occasional dispensaries for hardware or vegetables, and finally into farmland. They were alone. No one was following them. "Let’s stop and have a rest," Lin called over his shoulder.

They steered off the road where a small hill sloped up to a grove of willows, dropped their bikes, and sat in the grass. Off in the distance the fields marched in squares, marked off by brown-ribboned canals, punctuated here and there by the sand-colored houses made of earth. Lin pulled an orange out of his pocket and gouged at the peel with a small knife. He gazed out at the landscape and nodded as if satisfied.

"You seem to like it here."

He handed her a section, cradled in his broad palm. "You can say I have an interest in this area. I tried to get a permit to visit here in seventy-four."

"You mean you wanted to be sent here to do your work in the countryside?" She knew that educated city youth had been forcibly reassigned to rural areas then. The Cultural Revolution. She thought back. Sixty-six to seventy-six: she had been so young then, a child playing along the damp, oppressive Houston bayous, alone and jealous and full of rage at a world which seemed all wrong to her and dreaming about someplace where she would belong, really belong, and meanwhile here in China hundreds of millions of souls were flying apart. The blood in that decade drained out onto the earth faster than it could be dammed up. Later, when she came to understand the language, and began working here, she heard the stories gushing bitterly from everyone. The horror of it finally settled on her. "Why did you want to be sent here?"

"I wanted to try and visit my wife."

A wife! But of course, he was a mature man, older than she. "So—she was the one sent here?"

"That’s how it was."

"And why do you say ’try to visit’? If you were both sent here, couldn’t you just be assigned to the same place?"

He didn’t answer right away, but made a great show of peeling the orange.

"This was a Cultural Revolution thing, right?" she persisted.

"It was during the Chaos, yes."

Alice kicked herself. She couldn’t shake the habit of using the phrase wenhua da geming, cultural revolution. Stupid. Naive. Many Chinese didn’t reply with that phrase, cultural revolution. To them it was something so much larger and more engulfing. They often called it the Chaos.

"Dr. Lin, I guess you’re not talking about her just being sent downcountry." His hand shook and the point of the knife made a jagged tear in the orange’s delicate membrane. A drop of juice welled up and dripped down the side. "Of course not," he said, and now an edge was in his voice.

"So you mean..." She didn’t want to say the word, in case she was wrong.

"Laogai, " he said, and dug hard at the orange with the knife. Just the one word was enough, laogai. Literally it meant "reform prison," but everyone knew it was a shadow world of hard labor, and lots of people disappeared into it and never came out. She saw the tight irritated press of his mouth. This happened to her a lot. She spoke pretty well, and so people thought she would float easily into the oblique nuances favored by Chinese intellectuals. For them, it was all about allusion: more beautiful than definition. But she never seemed to talk that way. Language fluency was only language fluency. It didn’t make her Chinese.

"Look, I’m sorry." She didn’t know if she meant about his wife, or her west-ocean-person rudeness.

"Mei guanxi, " he said, It doesn’t matter. But