there’s always a chance, isn’t there? Some people return from the laogai. Like Little Yan’s uncle. Remember? The family had given him up for lost? And then they found him again, his teeth gone, his health ruined, but alive, he was alive ....."
But that had been years ago. He knew of no one who had been gone as long as Meiyan had been gone, gone without letters or messages, and come back.
And now a surprise, Mo Ai-li, Little Mo—not so little, clearly a woman past thirty who should have been married long since. There was no doubt he felt drawn to her. And she seemed to feel the same way. At least she prodded him with her questions, stared at him when she thought he didn’t see, even sat next to him in the vehicle and at meals. None of this had escaped Kong’s notice. Kong had even joked to him one day that he must let him know whether Western women were really different, as was said. "Bie shuo-le," Lin had replied curtly, Don’t talk like that, but his answer only made Kong laugh and he regretted, later, having responded at all.
Yet she was different. She didn’t retreat, didn’t defer, didn’t laugh behind her hand like a Chinese woman—in spite of her reasonable grasp of the language and her constant, often ridiculous attempts to follow Chinese manners. Despite all that she spoke to him with a bold intelligence. She might, he thought, be a woman with whom he could talk of the many things he considered in private: linguistics twisting back three thousand years to the scapulimancy of the Shang dynasty; the magical jumble of stories and legends that remained from the dawn of Chinese history; the faint picture—which he often reviewed in his mind—of Homo erectus roaming this land half a million years ago. Then north China had been fertile, wet, a green jungle, not the arid ocean of alluvial silt it was today. There Sinanthropus had not made his own shelter, but had taken refuge where he could, in caves and under outcroppings and in groves by the side of the river....
It had been Meiyan’s field, too, Homo erectus. He pedaled harder, thinking of the afternoon they got married in Gao Yeh’s room in Zhengzhou. They had got the go-ahead from the danwei, months after requesting permission from the university Party boss to "talk about love." It had been winter. The other students crowded in, padded blue jackets and stuffed-up trouser legs jostling for space. Gao Yeh shouting, drunk, how lovely their life together was going to be, and singing the children’s song:
As the sun rose over the mountain
A student came riding along.
He sat on a dapple-gray pony
And sang a scrap of song.
To the home of his bride he was going
And he hoped that she wouldn’t be out.
He saw as he pushed the door open
The girl he was thinking about.
Her cheeks were as pink as a rosebud.
Her teeth were as white as a pearl.
Her lips were as red as a cherry.
Most truly a beautiful girl!
How strange he could remember that, he thought now, pedaling past the patchwork of open fields, the wind off the Helan Shan whistling by. He remembered, too, the laughter that had exploded at the nursery rhyme’s end, everyone nodding, yes, yes, wasn’t it so, and the bowls of hard candy going around and around the room—Happiness Candy, the politically correct substitute for the then-forbidden wedding banquet. Nineteen seventy-one. Meiyan had worn a blue cotton suit like everyone else, except that it was her sharply ironed best. He remembered how her milk-white oval face had radiated joy.
Then after they were married, there was the single memory that had become a well-marked door in his mind: lying in bed with her afterward in the small room on Renmin Road in Zhengzhou, the sheets crumpled on the floor, talking about Lantian man, the Homo erectus find in south China to which she had devoted her study. Playing with the Homo erectus tooth she wore on a cord around her neck, never took off, not even when her entire naked length was smothered beneath him. She had stolen it from the vault where the Lantian County fossils were kept. Strange. Had she been caught stealing and wearing such an important cultural relic she’d have earned herself a PLA bullet in the head. Yet this had never been discovered and she had been sent to prison for a political misstep in a scholarly essay, a trifle, chicken feathers