A Death in China (7 page)

“Yes. Were you with him the last night?”

“At the beginning. Some of my colleagues here had arranged a special banquet for us in honor of my brother—a Peking duck banquet. You will forgive my patriotism, Professor Stratton, but I am assured by men who know that Peking duck is the single finest dish in the world. It is also, for Chinese people, quite expensive. My brother and I were both moved by my colleagues’ gesture. It was a wonderful meal, one I shall remember always. Afterwards, I went with David back to his hotel, but I did not join him for tea. I had a meeting.”

Wang Bin’s eyes again strayed to the ceiling.

“Someone came for me there to say that David had been stricken. I rushed to the hospital, but the comrade doctors said he was dead when he arrived. Heart, they said.”

“I’m sorry,” said Stratton.

“Your embassy has inquired about David’s passport. The comrades at the hospital told me that intravenous solution had spilled on the passport during the attempt to save David. An apprentice, not knowing what it was, threw it away. He will be punished.”

Stratton sipped some of his own tea. He had the overwhelming sensation that he was being lied to, fed a carefully contrived script. But what was the lie? And, more important, why?

“Tell me about America, Professor Stratton.”

The request caught Stratton off guard.

“Well, how—I mean—what would you like to know?”

“I would like to know something of the truth, something between the lies of the Revolution and the lies of the American Embassy. It is not often that a senior Chinese official may speak frankly with an American without someone present to listen.”

Better natural access than any of us will ever get, Linda Greer had said. Well, why not?

“I am partial, of course, Comrade Minister, but it is one of the few places on earth where a man is actually free. Think what you like. Do what you like. Which is not to say that it is a nation without problems. Many people never think at all, and even more talk without having anything to say. It is a beautiful and powerful and vigorous and violent country.”

“Yes, I have always admired the vigor without understanding the violence.”

“You must come to visit.”

“I would like that, but my duties here and”—his hand waved at the window, toward the Communist Party headquarters across the massive square—”elsewhere do not permit it. But tell me about my brother’s America. Tell me about the special place he will be buried.”

“The Arbor,” Stratton said. David’s pride.

Soon after he had appeared at St. Edward’s as a young assistant professor, David Wang had bought an abandoned dairy farm on the outskirts of Pittsville. When he hadn’t been teaching, he’d begun to work the land. Not to farm it, or forest it exactly, but to manicure it, to build it into a place of beauty according to his own orderly view. David had planted stands of pine and maple, birches and oak, as well as exotic trees he grew from seed. A clear stream bubbled through the Arbor into an exquisite formal lake on the lee side of a gentle hill. David Wang had done most of the work himself, with simple tools. When he hadn’t been in the classroom, he could be found on his land or deep in an armchair in the old white clapboard farmhouse that had no locks on the doors.

Over the years the town had grown; tract houses now flanked the Arbor on two sides and an interstate lanced through an adjoining ridgetop. But nothing molested the tranquillity and the beauty of David Wang’s oasis, and nothing ever would. Gradually it had become part park, part botanical garden, a place of fierce civic pride. Stratton could remember spring weekends when sixty people, from rough-hewn farmers in bib overalls to shapely college girls in cutoffs, would appear at the Arbor as volunteer gardeners. And how many St. Edward’s coeds, over the years, had surrendered their virginity on an aromatic bed of pine needles? Stratton smiled at his own memories. Anyone was free to wander the land, and no one dared molest it. This was where David Wang wanted to be buried.

Stratton spoke haltingly at first, and then with a rush of details. The Arbor was a place of both beauty and meaning.

Wang Bin displayed such lively interest that for an instant Stratton wondered, absurdly, whether the deputy minister believed that his brother had willed him the land. Everybody in Ohio who knew about the Arbor also knew that David Wang had publicly promised it to the college.

As he talked, Stratton mentally weighed what he knew about David’s death against what Wang Bin had told him. There was something …

And then he had it.

” … would liked to have enjoyed it at David’s side,” Wang Bin was saying.

“Yes, of course.” But what did it mean, damn it?

Wang Bin looked at Stratton sharply, as though he had divined the wandering of a perplexed mind. From the table he took a leatherbound volume that looked like a diary. He handed it to Stratton.

“Here, this is my brother’s journal. Apparently he was addicted to writing something nearly every day. I was interested in his first impressions of China. I would be grateful if you could take it with you.” Wang Bin rose. “And I am in your debt, Professor Stratton, for agreeing to accompany David’s body. I am sure your presence will smooth the formalities. I am assured that the body has been prepared to the most exacting standards.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I know little of such things, Professor, since corpses are cremated in China, but I believe my brother would have appreciated a simple ceremony as quickly as it can be arranged. For my part, I think it is particularly fitting that he be buried in the Chinese coffin in which he makes his last journey.”

“That should be no problem. But, look, about my accompanying the body. I’m not sure … ” Stratton wanted some fresh air, some room to think.

“Why?” Wang Bin asked sharply. He made no effort to hide the strength behind the question.

Stratton improvised.

“This has been very emotional for me. The thought of David’s body riding in the cargo hold of the same plane … I’m not sure that I’m up to it.”

“It is all arranged, Professor. My car will call for you in ample time for the flight. Everything is taken care of.”

“But … “

“You must.” Stratton could taste the menace.

Later, Stratton would not remember leaving the museum, or whether he walked back to the hotel or had been driven. What he remembered with clarity was sitting on the bed, staring out the hotel window, puzzling, and the lie—and wondering why.

If you were a man in your sixties with serious heart trouble, would you go to China, where tourism is rigorous and health facilities are primitive by American standards? Perhaps, if it was to see a long-lost brother.

But, if you did go, would you remember those life-giving pills that you had to take two or three times a day “for the next forty years”? Of course. And if you took them with you, would you take them for the entire trip and a reserve supply, just in case? Again, yes.

And there logic exploded. Stratton had examined David Wang’s effects with care. The only medication he had found was an unopened bottle of Excedrin.

Grass, like nearly everything else in China, is subject to political interpretation. Historically, the Chinese have taken a dim view of grass. In Peking’s parks, the dirt is swept daily since cleanliness is prized, but gardeners relentlessly uproot any tuft of grass. Grass breeds disease, generations of Chinese have been taught. Additionally, Communist doctrine teaches that grass is decadent since it is usually associated with leisured classes and generates exploitation—one man hiring another to cut it.

In the pragmatic years, though, when the town fathers of Peking were allowed to gaze at their city without ideological blinders, they recoiled at what they saw. Peking, capital and presumed showcase of the most populous nation on earth, was a mess—overcrowded, disorganized, dreadfully polluted.

An emerging generation of Chinese environmentalists has sought to repair the wreckage by planting trees and, yes, grass. But history does not die without a fight. So it is that on some weeks students at Chinese elementary schools can hear a lecture one day from an earnest ecologist on the virtues of grass and another from a functionary of public health on the merits of its destruction.

Tom Stratton, amused by the ongoing struggle between tradition and modernization, had early on spotted a fresh plot of grass on the shoulder of a new highway overpass near his hotel.

It was on this hard-won and possibly temporary bit of green that he sat cross-legged in the heat of a summer’s afternoon to read David Wang’s journal.

august 10.

Peking overwhelms me, and it is only my second day. Walking the streets, I realized how cluttered and musty my memories have become. As a child, I visited this city a dozen times, and for all these years, I have carried visions of its history and art, visions of brilliant colors and vibrant people.

Yet that is not what I have found so far. What has struck me, instead, has been the crush of masses of people—all seemingly in a hurry and all almost faceless amid the brownness of the city. Each block seems to have at least one noisy factory. Brick chimneys spew so much filthy smoke that hundreds of Chinese customarily wear surgical masks, called koujiao, to protect their throats and lungs from infection. For a city with so few automobiles and trucks, I have never seen, or breathed, such foul air.

I suppose that this is one of the prices that the government has chosen to pay for industrialization, and I must admit that I have seen several great technological accomplishments. This morning, for example, I made a trip to the Grand Canal, which stretches eleven hundred miles to Hangchow. It is the longest man-made waterway in the world and many Chinese believe that it is more of a masterpiece than even the Great Wall.

During my childhood, however, the Grand Canal never was fully utilized because it had become blocked with silt and impossible to navigate at many key ports. My father told me it had been that way all during his life; my grandfather, too, could not remember the Grand Canal in its prime.

Yet, I learned, under the Communists the canal has been redredged during the last twenty years and is now thriving from Peking to its terminus. The economic benefits of this must be incalculable for cargo transport, as well as agriculture. Yet I fear that the human costs of the intense restoration program also were incalculable; in that area, my guide provided no information.

Tomorrow I meet my niece for the first time. Of course I am nervous, but I am also nervous about seeing my brother again. With so much on my mind, it has been difficult to absorb and appreciate the changes in this ancient place.

august 11.

The most disturbing thing just happened. When I returned to my room, I discovered that someone had searched my belongings. Nothing was missing, but several things are out of order. My passport, which I had left under a pile of undershirts, had obviously been examined and replaced. I found it in another drawer. I complained to the room attendant, but he seemed uninterested. In all, it has been a stressful day.

This morning, at the former Democracy Wall, I struck up a conversation with a young man whose father had once been prominent in the Communist Party. Perhaps because the man could see by my clothing that I was an overseas Chinese, a huh chiao, he spoke with surprising candor.

He told me that his father had once enjoyed a promising career, that he had risen in the bureaucracy from a street cadre to being a Party officer of some standing. One night, while dining with several comrades at a restaurant here in Peking, the Party man recited a poem that he had written to celebrate the Cultural Revolution. It was an amateurish but lively verse that extolled Mao and glorified the progress of the Party. The last lines of his father’s poem, the young man told me, said:

And in the radiant future, all China’s children

Will sing in freedom and dance in universal happiness.

Several weeks passed, the young man recounted, and then his father was suddenly arrested by the army. He was stripped of his Party membership and charged with counterrevolutionary behavior. At his trial, the prosecutors charged that the man’s poetry encouraged laziness and immorality. Why? Because good, strong Party workers would never have the time, or desire, for song and dance. Such frivolous things, the prosecutors said, belong only in the theater.

The man, whose name was Cheng Hua, was never given a chance to speak in his own defense. He was not even permitted to introduce the complete poem into evidence to demonstrate his loyalty and love for the government.

Cheng was sentenced to eight years in a prison camp. His son told me he is not allowed any visitors, but letters are delivered once every two months. One of his father’s closest friends is the man who turned him in, the young man told me. This story made me profoundly depressed.

At lunchtime I met my niece, Kangmei. She is a beautiful girl of twenty-three, slender, with a luminous smile and a very quick mind. Unlike most Chinese women, she likes jeans and silky shirts—from Hong Kong, she told me. She was fascinated by my descriptions of the United States, so much so that I could scarcely get her to tell me anything about life in China. Of her father—my brother—she said little. “He is a man of power and achievement,” Kangmei said—but, of course, this I already know.

She described her studies at the Foreign Languages Institute and impressed me with her flawless English. In a few months, she will graduate and assume a prestigious job as a government translator. Kangmei said she is looking forward greatly to the travel opportunities, and to meeting more European and American visitors.

Finally, near the end of our lunch, I asked my niece about the young man whom I had met at Democracy Wall. I told her his sad story.

“Such events were not uncommon,” she remarked. “The boy’s father was very unwise to reveal his poem, even to friends. Within the Party, many cadres rise and prosper by informing on fellow workers. Everyone should be cautious.”

“But it seems so wrong,” I replied.

“Your outlook is different,” Kangmei said. “We who live here understand. There is freedom only for the old men who exploit the Chinese people.”

As we talked more, I learned that my niece is a woman of firm opinions. She possesses a keen, questioning intellect—and I am heartened by it. We promised to meet again after I had seen Wang Bin.

august 12.

Today I walked down the Avenue of Eternal Tranquility, toward the western wall of the Forbidden City. I had a notion to visit the palaces, but first I stopped to buy a knitted hat from a vendor named Hong.

I noticed that one of his legs had been removed at the hip. Because of his youthfulness—he appeared about thirty—such a handicap seemed unusual. I asked him if he had been in a bicycle accident, which is common in the city.

Hong smiled and said no, he had lost the leg as a teenager. The year was 1966. His father was a prominent scientist. One of his colleagues, a Party member, was very jealous. He accused Hong’s father of secretly passing scientific papers to pro-Western publications in Taiwan.

The Red Guards came to the scientist’s apartment. Hong, who was seventeen and full of fire, took a punch at one of the intruders. The youth was quickly knocked to the floor, and beaten so badly with the butt of a rifle that his leg bones were shattered. His father was put in detention for eighteen months, and was freed only after his accuser was arrested—for lying about the loyalty of another fellow worker.

Hong told me that he bears no ill will toward the Red Guards. I find that difficult to believe.

Later this afternoon, I had a marvelous surprise by the lake at the Summer Palace. I ran into an old friend, Thomas Stratton. He once was a student of mine at St. Edward’s, and now teaches art history at a college in New England. Tom is visiting China with a group of art historians and he is understandably eager to break away from the entourage as soon as possible.

I promised him a personal tour of Peking, as soon as I return from Xian. There’s some wonderful Qing hung porcelain on display in a state gallery near the Heping. I think we’ll stop there first.

Tomorrow is the biggest day of my trip. In the morning, I fly to Xian where I am to meet my brother at eleven sharp. After lunch, we will tour the archaeological site of the tomb of the Emperor Qin.

I’m thrilled about visiting this historical dig, but I’m even more excited about seeing Wang Bin again. He is only a year younger, but history and political fortunes have cast us centuries apart. Even without knowing him, I fear that we will be the inverse of each other. Perhaps not. Perhaps the journey backward to our Chinese childhood is not so great. It is easy to remember little Bin’s face as a boy. But it has been fifty years since we were together in my father’s home. And, in that time, I have not seen so much as a photograph. His invitation was so unexpected that I didn’t know how to respond.

I think it will be a powerful reunion.

Tom Stratton closed his friend’s journal and walked thoughtfully back to his hotel.

The words faithfully belonged to David, and reading them freshened Stratton’s grief. It was so typical of his old friend, he thought, to be moved more by the people of Peking than its art or scenery. David Wang had not returned for the temples and tombs of China, but for the people like Cheng and Hong. Each day had brought new faces, new chances to learn: What is it really like? What have I missed? Should I have come back sooner?

But David Wang was a circumspect man; not all of what he saw and heard would be recorded in his notebook—of this Stratton was sure. The professor had probably altered the names of the Chinese to protect them from reprisals. He had also carefully refrained from political commentary that could backfire against his brother, the deputy minister.

But the journal ended too abruptly.

It contained no mention of David Wang’s trip to Xian, or of his reunion with his brother. Stratton was baffled, for the professor unfailingly wrote in the notebook each night before going to bed. Why—full of such emotion, and dazzled by exotic sights—would David have forsaken this habit while on this most important trip?

Opening the journal again in his room, Stratton flipped to the last written pages. Something caught his eye. He retrieved a metal fingernail file from his luggage and slipped it between the pages, pressing toward the spine of the notebook. The binding easily gave way, and the pages separated in loose stacks.

Stratton ran a finger across the inside borders of the paper. It felt sticky. He held one page to his nose. The glue was pungent, and new. Someone had pried Wang’s journal apart, and then glued it back together so it would appear undisturbed. No ragged stubs revealed where the missing pages had been.

It was a professional job, Tom Stratton thought. Almost perfect.

“Every time I see you, you’re riding solo,” Jim McCarthy said with a cannon laugh. “Your tour group really must be wall-to-wall losers, huh?”

Stratton accepted McCarthy’s offer of a bottle of Peking-brewed Coca-Cola.

“Almost like home,” the newsman said. “Now where did you want me to take you?”

Stratton said, “The Foreign Languages Institute.”

“And what,” McCarthy said, “do you plan to do there? Stare at the walls? Pose for pictures with a few soldiers outside the gate? It’s a restricted area, baby. No Yanks allowed. It’s definitely not on the tour, yours or anybody else’s.”

Stratton told McCarthy about David Wang.

“Death by duck, right? That’s what Powell said, I bet.”

“Yes,” Stratton replied. “How did you know?”

“Because the bastard ripped the lead off one of my stories to steal that phrase. Fucking cretins at State, no imagination. Suppose I should be flattered.”

“So there really is such a thing?”

“Sure.” McCarthy pried open the Coke on a desk drawer handle and guzzled half. “Just your basic tourist burnout, really. The Peking roast duck dinner gives it a nice twist, though. I wrote the story two years ago and the stats have held up. Quite a few elderly Americans die every year in the great China adventure, but it’s not a trend that gets much publicity. I remember one old geezer who arrived lugging a heavy suitcase and went home inside it.”

“Huh?”

“His wife had him cremated and continued the tour—said he would have wanted it that way.”

Stratton blanched.

“Hey, Stratton, I don’t mean to sound like a total prick about it. I’m sorry about your friend, really I am. But what’s it got to do with the Foreign Languages school?”

“David’s niece is a student there.”

McCarthy whistled. “It’s a tough school to get into.”

“Her father is Wang Bin, a deputy minister. David’s younger brother.”

“Right, I remember now.”

“The girl saw David shortly before he left for Xian to meet Bin. I want to talk to her, just to make sure everything was all right.” Stratton decided not to mention the journal or the passport.

McCarthy said, “I’m not exactly a low-profile character in this town. More like the Jolly Red Giant. With me at your side, you don’t stand a fucking prayer of getting in.

“But I tell you what. Go with my driver. He’ll take you to the gate and haggle on your behalf. He speaks some English and he’s worked miracles for me, but don’t get your hopes up. You might have to settle for leaving a note—and then it could be another four weeks before you get an answer. I’m not kidding. Watching this government in action is like watching a bad ballet performed in molasses.”