Lost in Translation Page 0,6

air. "My little girl sit next to a colored boy in school? Never!" She felt his powerful grip around her waist, the whoosh as she was lifted off the ground and waved like a ceremonial flag. "This is my little girl named Alice. The prettiest little girl in the world!" She remembered her panic, her torn, jumbled breathing that didn’t let her form the words Stop—please—then the staccato burst of flashbulbs and it was over. She was dropped back down on the chair. Then the crowds streamed out, poured into the streets of the Fourth and Fifth wards, where the blacks lived. Hands that had applauded now brandished ax handles and Coke bottles filled with gasoline.

People always remembered her name after that. When the smoke cleared and the charred houses had been hosed down and the three girls were carried away in bags, her name had been found, scrawled in chalk on the soot-blackened sidewalks: Alice.

"Yes," she told him softly over her pounding heart, "I’m the same Alice. But I was only a small child then, and I prefer not to get into it. I mean, now you know. But let’s just leave it there."

"No problem," he said, stabbed with embarrassment. "Look, I’m sorry. And hey. If I were you I’d spend my whole damn life in China too. Really. I understand."

"I doubt you do," she managed. "But thanks."

The waitress returned and left the check. Alice slid it across the table to Spencer. "One thing," she told him. "Nobody knows me as Alice Mannegan here. I use a Chinese name —Mo Ai-li. It’s easier."

"You want me to call you that? Mo—"

"Mo Ai-li. No. You don’t have to. Call me Alice." She pushed back from the table and stood up. "After all. You’re a foreigner too."

Vice Director Han of the IVPP, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, leaned his blocky frame back in his teakwood desk chair. His office was plain and functional but the furniture was dark old wood, solid, and good antique brush-paintings hung on the walls. Outside the windows roared the mighty flow of Xizhimenwai, the stream of trucks and carts and cars, people and bicycles, the wall of voices and horns and the mechanical clamor of a city under construction. The vice director surveyed the American Ph.D. Crude and washed out and covered with curly yellow hair. So outsidelike.

And with him this copper-headed interpreter, who went, in Chinese, by the professional name Mo Ai-li. Mo Loving and Upright. A good name, old fashioned; she had some taste, clearly. Of course she was still a foreigner, she had that manic aggressive look in her eyes that they all had. Though she was easier to look at, small and less—a fleeting purse of his lips— less flamboyantly shaped than most of the outside women.

"Vice Director Han," she was saying, translating closely behind the blond man’s English. "We need permits. In 1923, in the Northwest, the French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin discovered the first buried Late Paleolithic site in East Asia. This is the site called Shuidonggou, in Ningxia Province. Teilhard de Chardin loved the northwestern deserts. He always longed to return there. Dr. Spencer says it is critical to begin searching at this site in northern Ningxia, and in the desert around it called"—she turned and asked the man for the name again—"called the Ordos."

"Those areas are closed."

"We know. Thus it is we ask for permits."

They are more than closed, he thought, annoyed. They are full of missile bases, gleaming nuclear prongs concealed in caves and aimed at Russia. And not only missile bases—forced labor camps. Aloud he said: "The Peking Man remains were excavated here, at Zhoukoudian, just outside the city. They were never in that part of China. Never sent there for exhibition. Never studied there." He coughed meaningfully.

She nodded. Then the two talked in their broken and bumped-up English. "Still,"—she returned to Chinese—"this scientist believes that the French priest may have recovered Sinanthropus at the end of the Japan War and sent it out there."

"May I ask why he believes this?"

"Because his grandfather was a friend of the priest. The priest confided in his grandfather that he had been befriended by a Colonel Akabori, an officer in the occupation force and an amateur paleontologist. Teilhard was anti-Japanese, like a lot of the French trapped in Peking during that period, but Akabori appears to have been offering him something—Peking Man."

Vice Director Han mulled this: Takeo Akabori, yes, a minor figure, in charge of handling Peking’s foreigners