Chapter One

“So?” says the beautiful woman with the steam iron. “What’s it going to be?”

“I’m formulating a reply,” I say, stalling.

“Formulate faster,” she says. “I always know when you’re hiding something from me.”

“You’re steaming your bangs, dear.”

Lillian lowers the steam iron. “Don’t tell me Hydrangea Labs called. They did, didn’t they? Why would those awful people call us completely out of the blue?”

“They faxed,” I correct her. “And the sky above Beijing hasn’t been blue since the Ming dynasty. Good job, otherwise.”

The money was attractive at the time. Researchers are always casting about for identical twins, say nothing of mixed-sex polar-body twins such as Lillian and myself, la crème de la crème of gender factor elimination and control group fulcruming and just general number cookery. So of course Lillian and I accepted the occasional dollar or two as research subjects during our lean college years, and when Hydrangea Laboratories stepped forward with an offer of nine dollars an hour each to do stupid telepath tricks, we bit hard.

At the time, nine dollars purchased three monaural record albums of your choice. With her first check, Lillian purchased the complete works of both Liberace and Andy Williams, in stereo.

I bought drugs.

“What did they say?” asks Lillian.

“To call Chicago.”

Frowning, Lillian flips the blue silk dress she’s ironing. A Chinese bed makes for a very fine ironing board. An ironing board, conversely, is far too soft for a Chinese bed. And you can unstop an obdurate squat toilet with a small Chinese child. Not everyone knows that.

“Are you going to call them?” asks Lillian.

“Of course not.”

“Good.”

This hotel room is nearly identical to mine, down to the pink, peach, and gold color scheme, except for the roach electrocution device plugged in near the floor lamp. My room doesn’t have a roach electrocution device, thank God. I’d have tried making coffee on it by now. I smuggled a half-pound of multi-grind into this country, but there’s nothing here to brew it in. Tomorrow I’ll be dipping it like snuff.

Beijing Telecommunications of Postal Sanitarium. That’s the name of my hotel. I think this place, mid-campus of Peking University where Lillian rooms with Tree Carter, is called Splendid Auspicious of Tubercular Travelodge.

“How did Hydrangea find out where we are?” asks Lillian.

I don’t roll my eyes. It requires an effort. “Our passports were just swiped at four airports in three countries, dear. There really are very few secrets in the world.”

Especially with my sister around. I note with satisfaction that the inquisitive one has required an entire day to pick my brain about the fax from Hydrangea. Maybe putting garlic in my socks is actually working. And thus far she seems to have gleaned nothing at all of that nasty business with the singing condom machine earlier today.

Best not think about that right now.

The Year of the Horse is supposed to be about charging ahead with great and purposeful spirit. Deep into August, however, our 2002 seems to be veering.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asks Lillian coolly.

“You asked me to handle the research people,” I reply with equal aplomb. “So I’m handling the research people.”

And absolutely nothing happened today directly or indirectly involving a condom-vending machine, singing or non-singing.

I watch Lillian drape her blue dress over a hanger. She packed business this trip, meaning grey, blue, and white, the only colors my sister imagines she doesn’t look astonishing in. She’s wrong about the blue. Lillian still has the radiant thing going, the platinum mane and milk skin. We’re both more or less the same creature, one that doesn’t seem to be ageing in any particular hurry. Lil’s arms and neck are still long and slender, and when the sun catches the emerald in her eyes—no wonder the Chinese are driving their cars into lampposts.

Slight touch of narcissism. My twin sister and I each stand one point nine three meters in height, which works out to six feet and four inches. When we decide to really light it up, say on Oscars night, she and I dress as one, down to our matching black-out shades and expressionless stares. The Mancer twins. Lillian and Julian. Identical in every way but sexual category. Very rare. Very sought after. Look for us between Madonna and Marilyn Manson in Who’s Who. I’m the one on the left.

“Doo, would you be a doll and get us some take-out?” says Lil, spreading a white blouse across the bed. Doo is baby talk for Julian. Depending on the baby, I suppose.

I tell her it’s out of the question.

“Please please please?” she begs.

I ignore her.

Hydrangea Labs got their money’s worth. We were telling them what they’d had for breakfast. I sent and Lil received. She turned out to be especially clever at identifying postage stamps of the world. There was one streak where we were hitting very close to twelve hundred percent above random. After that, no more postage stamps of the world. Suddenly Lillian was being asked to describe the contents of filing cabinets and prison cells and missile facilities and leopard-skin panties and God only knows what. I was shunted off meanwhile to crude medical experiments I’d rather not recall in any detail. We were told it was all “hypothetical,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Then Bob’s Appliance Repair and Lawn Mower Emporium discovered a hypothetical listening device in Lillian’s toaster oven. We resigned at Hydrangea the following day, never to hear from them again until twenty-seven hours ago, going on twenty-seven point three three three.

With a loud electronic click, the door opens and Tree Carter enters, wheezing heavily.

“What did the doctor say?” asks Lil.

“To stay close to the toilet,” pants Tree, dropping her purse onto a nightstand. In a single rolling motion, Tree casts her considerable mass onto the nearer twin bed. It doesn’t even flinch. You could play pocket billiards on a Chinese bed. And with a small Chinese child…

“That’s all he said?” asks Lil. “Stay close to the toilet?”

“That’s all he said. I told him I already had that part figured out. When do I get better? He said mmm very difficult know this.”

Tree does a not-bad Chinese man for a three-hundred-seven-pound African American woman with a case of the canters. I found her weight online. Tree’s famous. Not in Who’s Who but famous.

“I guess that’s why he’s a hotel doctor,” says Lil.

Still panting, Tree shakes her head of close-cropped curls, and her ear hoops dance. “This mess is diabolical with a capital di-. A capital di-.”

Tree is short for Shatrina. Shatrina is short for New Age radio diva gone totally mad on organic lettuce wraps and pickled pigs’ feet and books channeled from the left bank of the Milky Way. Her weekly talk show, Shatrina, is aired in over three hundred American cities and five foreign countries, counting the free state of Texas. Tree’s popularity is due less to the predictable line of New Age pap, I’d say, than to the woman’s voice which at most moments is an emphatic purr, sweet yet gritty like the honey at the mouth of the jar.

“Qing’s revenge,” I say.

Both women look at me.

“Jia Qing was the emperor forced to sign the Unequal Treaties with the West,” I say. “In China, travelers’ diarrhea would be Qing’s revenge.”

“We’re so fortunate to know that,” says Lil.

“Wasn’t my doing,” says Tree.

All of this is Tree Carter’s doing. It was she who told my sister that their soul destinies awaited them in China, so of course they rush to sign one-year contracts to teach Conversational English to the young and post-commie at a Shenzhen public high school. “It’s about the kids, the Indigos,” Tree is fond of trilling. “China has gone totally Indigo, and those kids need our guidance now if they’re to guide us later.”

If the authorities don’t seize Tree’s mini satellite uplink, she will feed her weekly radio show from Shenzhen. She got the uplink past customs by saying it was a personal medical device. If my sister could get her hands on it for one night, it would be.

Tree says the soul destinies of all three of us await in China, mine included, not that I’d be caught dead or maimed anywhere near my soul destiny. I’m just here for the jet lag. And of course to watch over the girls as they settle in for their year of teaching abroad. It’s the least I can do.

I shoot my sister a suspicious stare. I’m almost certain I smell cigarette smoke in this room.

Actually I’m in Beijing because Miriam, my editor at Magazine Mariposa, wants something Chinese-y for September and I supposedly work for her glossy tax write-off of a haut prétention magazine. Miriam is dangling airfare if I produce two thousand words of Chinese-y before the September deadline which, factoring in the international date line, the eleven-hour time differential and the stray wormhole, I think was two and a half days ago. Too bad. I was just about to work up something on China’s singing condom machines. Melodies not maladies, something along that line.

Okay, the real reason I’m in Beijing is I owe money to some people in Memphis, which is a long and tortured story but suffice it to say I could use a little financial aid just now, and only Tree Carter is in a position to provide it, which matter I hope to broach with her as quickly as I can wrest Her Tree-ness away from my sister for a moment’s time.

“Lots of water,” I tell Tree.

Without opening her eyes, she holds up her liter of Binihana purified water.

“Good girl.”

“Doo’s going for take-out,” says Lil, seating herself at an impossibly small desk, towering stork-like above her notes on survival Mandarin. “Please please please? Tree and I have a huge test tomorrow and you can see she’s in no condition to go anywhere.”

“And I,” I reply, “am in no condition to order food in this country. I can’t even whistle in Mandarin.”

“Buffet place,” says Tree, eyes still closed. “Outside the West Gate.”

“Yeah,” says Lil, turning to bat her eyes at me. “The buffet place. Easy-schmeasy.”

I mull this over. In Beijing, easy-schmeasy may require an hour and a half of perplexing, draining, and sweat-dripping toil, and finally outright begging—half the struggle is fighting your way forward through the mob. There are no lines here, no taking of numbers, no politeness at all among strangers. But the acrobats are outstanding.

“Please please please?” says Lil.

I mull a little more, asking myself which is likely to be worse, humiliating myself in yet another Beijing restaurant or remaining here while my sister goes through my head like it’s her sock drawer. Lillian was once quite free with remote viewing my journal before I got my hands on two leaves of a NASA-grade titanium alloy as light as aluminum and impervious as adamantium. This stuff is resistant to penetration of almost any imaginable kind, so I had a jeweler fashion the two leaves into a binder for my journal.

Girl can’t get in.

I turn to gaze at my stork of a sister at her little desk. Lil so resembles our mother that I sometimes catch myself staring, not that Mom and I were ever particularly close. The senility helps. Now that she has no idea who I am, she seems to like me a good deal more.

Lil and I do seem to be ageing reasonably well, I reflect. Not a grey hair on either platinum head, nor a cavity in either chilly smile. Neither my sister nor I have ever so much as sneezed, when I stop to think about it, nor have we ever reacted in any way to the brute incursions of the sun. But who is without his or her little peculiarity? I once knew a woman with a dread of seeing her own feet. She was nearing thirty years of age and had yet to encounter them visually. I married that woman for some reason.

Suddenly Lil draws herself taller. “Why am I suddenly thinking about vending machines?”

I stand a bit too abruptly and lose my balance. I have to grab the floor lamp, which nearly goes down with me. Both Lil and Tree stare.

“Anybody feel like Chinese?”

Peking University is better by night, but outside Provo, Utah, what place isn’t? I feel practically at home within these seething shadows where lovers stroll and cicadas trill and utopian dreams molder beneath pressure of familial duty and sweet-and-sour exam scores. Curious how a windless summer night can transform a world-renowned university into a string of scruffy villages, randomly and dimly lit, un-weed-eaten, human infested, a slowly composting oasis of warm-beer–softened reflection within the glaring, blaring urban desert called Beijing. Unfortunately these collegiate meanderings have thus far produced no description of a gate nor even a real good screen door, East West North South Garden nor Pearly, let alone one with a buffet place.

“Just get us something—anything,” was Lil’s injunction.

“It better be good,” she added.

“It better be dead,” said Tree.

“It’ll be dead,” I assured them both, “if I have to kill it myself.”

As I turn back toward the lotus pond, a cool breeze stirs the dank summer scents and I think Canadian air mass moving in before I remember where I am. The breeze against my cheek would be a postcard from Siberia, and I’d do well to read it. To winter in Beijing, I’m given to understand, one wears all one’s clothes and several members of one’s family, not that I intend to hang around long enough to find out. Once Lillian and Tree have concluded their two-week intensive in survival Mandarin, off they go to teaching posts in Shenzhen—and I return to my small nest in Memphis with a new ending for The End of Day, which I must now wheedle out of Tree Carter.

That’s the title of my newest novel. The End of Day. I came up with it myself. The rest of the novel was channeled by Tree from the disincarnate soul of a late Pulitzer laureate with a lot of time on his hands and no way to order a martini. Like every other writer worth mentioning, the poor man was claimed by a wastrel’s death before he could deliver his best work, so would I please please please give it to the world beneath my own name, as my style of Southern Noir and his are all but indistinguishable—said he. A sly accusation, I believe. The thing is, this guy doesn’t even exist outside Tree’s general hoodoo-ness, and I have gambling debts in Memphis where aggravated assault is considered a form of aerobic exercise.

Besides, this material isn’t half bad. In fact, it’s pretty good.

Once more at the lotus pond, I study the approach of a sleeveless and bespectacled young man bearing a basketball beneath one arm. “Excuse me,” I say to him. “Could you possibly direct me to the West Gate?”

The student, tall and broad-shouldered, points out an arched footbridge partially shrouded in willows. “West Gate closs the blidge. You see?”

“The blidge?”

He nods pensively. “Closs and just go some more. You see later.”

“See later the glate? Closs first the blidge?”

“Yes,” says the young man, nodding earnestly.

“Who’s your favorite basketball player named Billy? Never mind. I have to go now. Best of luck with your studies.”

“Thank you very much,” says the young man.

“No, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“It’s you who are welcome, my friend.”

I head toward the arched footbridge. Students. More worthless with each generation.

I’ll be completely candid about those twelve chapters channeled by Tree Carter. I could no more produce prose of that quality than poo brown-and-serve rolls. So why not be a good sport and present Truman’s best work to the world beneath my own name, thereby reaping the critical and monetary rewards that life has thus far so miserably denied? But I will not accept his title. I have my artistic limits.

Dipping Between the Dip Slopes. That’s Truman’s title.

Beyond all that and central to the current dilemma, said material stopped coming after Chapter Twelve of what is clearly a thirteen-chapter book. Just. Stopped. “Finish it yourself,” said Tree.

True, I have three novels out there, the most recent of them named Best Southern Novel of 1999 by the Greater Birmingham, Alabama, Regional Library. “Focus inward on the native magic of your unique artistic voice,” said Tree. “Get off your ass and write,” said Lillian. So I got off my ass and focused on my native whatever it was and handed the result to my agent, Bernie, who instantly lined up a prime New York publisher who was not totally wild about the ending, beginning more or less with the first letter of the first word of Chapter Thirteen. All of which coincides very awkwardly with a personal cash-flow issue that we needn’t go into now but I, like, really need for Tree Carter to rediscover whatever snarly queer little splinter-personality it was that produced Chapters One through Twelve and pronto.

The night before I left Memphis, I discovered a cricket’s head in my bed. Could have been a coincidence, but how do you know?

Atop the arched footbridge, I pause to enjoy a moonlit vista of floating lotus pods in lurid, faintly pink bloom. Steadying myself against the wooden railing, I gaze straight up at the usual Beijing sheetrock and think completion. I’ve known all along that China is about completion. I boarded the plane in Memphis with a very clear sense that the various strands of my dishevelment were soon to meet in some kind of non-standard knot, hopefully sans the sort of pointless and painful catharsis I do my best to experience only when sleeping.

That same unbidden thought, completion, returned yesterday at a street market where I stood waiting to purchase four brown-dappled bananas. All at once the fruit merchant experienced a whole-body spasm that could have been Drunken Fruit Merchant Kung Fu before raising something to my face. It was a squealing rat impaled on an ice pick. I’m afraid I didn’t show the proper appreciation. Everyone else within earshot chuckled happily as the rat did the eeek-ing upside-down death dance.

China’s the endgame. I’m pretty clear on that. I’m just not sure what game it is we’re into here.

Go toward the light. Moth-like I allow myself to be drawn toward a luminescence beyond the trees, one more felt than seen.

Daddy was an anonymous sperm donor. Which I’m quite sure is the first line of at least one country song. It was Father dearest who provided the identicon and myself with our slightly different spins, our delightful little quirks, our semi-imprisonable offenses against norms and memes and baas. As how could those qualities have possibly flowed from dread, cold, and unimaginative Mother? Cue the cellos.

I start across a broad, empty plaza, all the while picturing Lillian hunched over her survival Mandarin notebook in the Roach Electrocution Suite, a burning cigarette in each hand and another in the ashtray. I went through hell to get that woman off cigarettes. Absolute. Hell.

On balance, I suppose I owe Lillian a lot. When we were scarcely more than babes, my sister came to the place where I was—just out there somewhere—and brought me in for a landing in consensus reality, or I’d probably be in What’s What rather than Who’s Who. My twin sister imagines that she still caretakes me, and I humor her. “Have you taken your meds, dear?” she asks offhand. Yes, dear. Thanks for caring, dear. See you in the glow, dear.

Beyond this dark plaza is a shadowy grove of trees pierced by a faintly glowing walkway. Entering, I shudder for no particular reason. As though one needs a particular reason in this twenty-five-dynasty-old city. That includes the commie one that’s going end-of-life as we speak. Which is to say, there are considerably more dead people in this town than living ones.

As a child in Memphis, a place most rich in unnatural death, I had my occasional little problem with bumps in the night before learning that I could exit the glow anytime I wished. Then at age twelve I discovered the liquor cabinet above the fridge and learned to exit a lot more than that.

Nothing much goes bump in the night anymore. Except for the occasional doorframe. Thanks for asking.

While we’re passing along deep soul secrets, there’s a small gambling addiction I’d like to own here. Though I’m not the least attracted to sports betting, nor the standard fifty-two-card deck, let alone anything directly or indirectly involving a revolving wheel, there is one particular amusement that does address me in a siren’s wail in one or another of my weaker moments. The result is the occasional financial quandary such as the current one—easily resolved once I obtain that final chapter.

I enter a tunnel of trees that becomes a tangle of handlebars. Parked jammed and stacked all around me, some of them two and three high, are more bicycles than could possibly exist. I’ve stumbled upon the world’s bicycle graveyard. Either that or I’m drawing closer to one of this campus’s four flood-lit gates.

A noble number, in its way, Four. Stodgy. Pointy-headed. An excellent basis for tables and chairs. I stopped at four marriages because of the importance of stability in an often unsteady world. Not to mention the many problems awaiting at Five and Six. I should explain that there was no television in our home during the tender interval between Lillian’s bringing me in and my acquisition of the liquor cabinet. My chief means of engagement during those years was to disappear into math. I was pretty good at it.

We arrive at the West Gate and we are impressed. Each of Peking U’s grandiose and lavishly turned-out portals is manned twenty-four-seven by uniformed guards, their primary duty being to intimidate bicyclists into dismounting as they closs the threshold where a young Mao Zedong once strode, Das Kapital beneath his arm. Mao worked at the campus library, there to discover the diverse worlds of ideas obtainable from books he would later find occasion to burn, actually padlocking the four gates of this university that now honor the memory of his footsteps.

My belly tightens as I scuttle past the guards. Why does Beijing need so many gates and guards? A casual stroll anywhere in this town requires passing through all kinds of portals of permission. I suppose it goes back to the days when Beijing was composed of hutongs or professional neighborhoods. You had one called Woodcutter, another called Wash Clothes or Wet Nurse or Make Soup, which may explain all these walls and gates. Or maybe the government just likes the idea of being able to lock Beijing down anytime they feel like it.

Nah.

Just beyond the spotlights of the gate, I’m swallowed by the swirling chaos of the street, the beeping and br-rr-ringing menagerie of bicycles and motorbikes and flat-bed trikes and all their weird hybrid children. And always the teeming footsore hordes, the dull faces and sightless eyes, the over-brimming kiosks and pee-smelling paving stones of a thoroughfare as broad as a city zoo and pointless as a chicken yard—all of it lit by the ugly brown-out haze of what the Chinese call public lighting. Beijing isn’t much brighter by day. On cloudless days you still can’t find the sun. You can scarcely see buildings two blocks away.

This town likes to go for forbidding Albert Speer-like scale, but you never quite leave the funky ferment of the stained little alleyways where shirtless old men sleep upright in wooden chairs and summer-sweet scents of simmering noodles and open sewers cavort with those of old fruit stalls and one-legged beggars and half-rotted mops. Everywhere you’ve got the violent collision of a millennia of failed ideas in urban planning and three millennia of no planning at all.

But what’s this? Across the broad boulevard are the paired lions and bobbing red lanterns of what seems to be the buffet place. Encouraged, I head for the double doors. They are flanked on either side by four red-uniformed women. Again I feel my belly tighten. Why does Beijing need so many doors and red-uniformed women? I brace myself and at half a furlong all eight girls explode with greetings, throwing open the double doors and inundating me with forward-leaning giggles that practically become kisses. Cringing, I enter a crowded restaurant practically as rich in noise as in cigarette smoke. Clawing my way through those and the syrupy aromas of courses five through nine, I ascertain that our buffet place is in fact a lunch buffet place, and here it is nearly eleven p.m. Back out I scuttle, shrinking back from the red-clad octa-girlie gauntlet just outside the doors.

Skulking south along whatever lu this is, I begin scouting for a picture menu taped to a window. Failing a buffet place, the next best option is a picture-menu place. Otherwise you’re reduced to pointing toward someone’s plate and saying that.

Beijing passes before me like a cough-syrup dream.

Just one more deep soul secret and I’ll be finished owning for the night. Sometimes Tree’s cheek-kisses come a little close to the corner of my mouth and I find myself transported to a climax beech forest on the second day of spring. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have Dr. Shatrina Carter figured out even on the most basic of levels, but listen to me. Whatever’s brewing within the hormonal soup kitchen of that Hummer body of hers I’d like to have in smokable form. Radio listeners the world over are in love with Tree Carter on the basis of purr alone, and many of those careless enough to take a hit of her pheromones are discovered three months later unshaven and bad-smelling wandering Highway 277 outside Wichita Falls.

Two men dodder arm-in-arm along the sidewalk, their newly lit cigarettes glowing brightly. One of them is singing “Yesterday Once More” at the top of his one good lung, cigarette bobbing in time.

Ehhh-veee sha-ra-ra-raaaaaaah…

This afternoon along this same stretch of sidewalk, I encountered five women beneath five black parasols, spaced as regularly as Magritte’s derbied Englishmen. For one or two eerie moments, they walked in perfect sync and I knew I’d just wandered into some other room. Sure enough, not three minutes later I encountered the singing condom machine. Five women. Five parasols. Beware.

Then, I haven’t taken my meds today.

It’s all rooms, you know. One moment you’re in this one. Next you’re in that one. Before me now, for example, sprawls a vast intersection where several hundred Chinese surge at eight curbs, daring the multi-lane traffic to show the least sign of hesitation. Do I even want to cross here, I ask myself forlornly, peering in one direction and the other. No matter. Soon the traffic lights will change and so will everything else. There’s little to be done about it.

The lights do change and I allow myself to be swept along by a human tsunami that engulfs a wooden cart and the hunched man laboring behind it. Next category, one hundred points. Things your sister has whined you into going out for. Two hundred points. Dishes you cannot place anywhere on the USDA food pyramid. Five hundred points. Chinese words that mean something / anything as long as it’s dead. Suddenly appear the headlights of left-turning taxis, their horns blaring. Pedestrians scatter in every direction, but I continue my arrogant saunter.

Take me.

The traffic lights glow a unanimous green now and little commuter cars begin honking at my ankles like so many enraged geese. To hell with them. I’m walking here.

There are nearly four million cars in Beijing and not a single old beater among them, for the simple reason that there were no passenger cars at all in this country until very recently. Boxy trucks, yes, and medieval buses and comical donkey-ish agricultural vehicles, all of which are still available for view.

Chinese eighteen-wheelers have fourteen wheels. We’ll let that serve as your introduction to Chinese logic.

I make it to the other curb. Nobody ever takes me when I say take me.

But we find ourselves in another room. Suddenly everyone is wearing polyester pajamas. Little kids are pedaling plastic trikes and women are ballroom dancing to boom-boxes and old men are hocking and spitting at one another’s feet. Somehow I have entered a residential area. No bobbing red lanterns. No basic food groups.

But wait. My eyes catch sight of a string of weather-skewed lanterns sagging in a nearby alley. We seem to have discovered a second- or third-tier restaurant of some stripe. We begin walking purposefully toward imagined scents of shark’s fin and cow’s spleen and piggie index finger. I don’t care if this place offers up leg of librarian, I’m going in there and coming out with little white boxes.

Inside our eatery are dismal smells of overheated peanut oil and under-cleaned ashtrays. The waitress gives me a gape as she scurries to deliver longnecks to a table of rowdies. We may actually be talking tier number four here. I scan the tables for something / anything dead but discover only beer bottles and smoldering butts.

Suddenly a voice in my right ear. “Excuse me. May I be of assistance?”

Though the accent is West End, London, I turn to encounter the smile of a Chinese man in his forties.

“The score of the Braves game?” I say. “Games, actually. It’s a twi-night doubleheader. Or maybe you could help me order a little take-out?”

The stranger laughs apologetically. “This is only a neighborhood restaurant. Not very good I’m afraid. I just come here for the soup. Very good for the health. Please allow me to show you a more splendid place.”

Herding me back onto the street, the stranger says, “There is a restaurant close by that’s very famous for Peking Duck. Do you like Peking Duck?”

I lie. What else can you do when the man’s national dish eats like a Rockport soaked in bacon drippings? So far, my favorite Chinese dish would be Egg Foo Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

The stranger leads me across the same street I just floated my very life to cross. He hands me a business card. “My name is Chen. If you ever need anything, anything at all, call me. I will be happy to help. Please, where are you from?”

Ah. The first of the three splendid questions. Next comes: how long have you been in China, followed closely by: what do you think of China. I provide the usual antiseptic answers and Chen celebrates the fact that I arrived here on an auspicious day. “This is very lucky for you. That day is Cowherd and Weaving Maiden Festival. You have heard of this?”

I haven’t heard of this.

“There is a legend about this day,” says Chen brightly. “Very long ago, a lonely girl just worked at her weaving all the time. The heavenly father took pity on her and sent her across the stars to marry a cowherd boy. They were very happy together but unfortunately the girl neglected her weaving, so the heavenly father sent her back home, saying you can visit your husband on the seventh day of the seventh month. Ever since, on that night many birds fly together and make a bridge so the weaving maiden can walk across the sky to visit her husband.”

Chen turns to beam at me. “Now Chinese women celebrate this night by climbing a hill to offer flowers to the sky.”

I stare at him. I’m still waiting for the lucky part. I’m also beginning to suspect this man of taking me back to the house of eight hi-theres. Eight is not my favorite integer.

“Personally,” I tell Chen, “I would call this a rather unhappy story.”

He laughs. “I think also. This is why only women go to the top of the hill. The men think this is not such a good deal.”

Chen knits his brow and sucks his teeth. Among the Chinese this means I-am-now-thinking-very-deeply. A Chinese may also place one hand near his mouth and say, “Nigga, nigga, nigga,” which means there’s a word on the tip of his or her tongue. Don’t try this in Memphis.

“But maybe every romantic story is also very sad,” says Chen, “like the play by William Shakespeare.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

He nods eagerly. “I think everyone enjoys this play so much because of the suffering. It is the same in life. The love is only as great as the suffering, like in the story of the weaving maiden. For three hundred sixty-four days, nothing but suffering. Then one night of love and—” He beams again. “All was worth it!”

“That goes a long way toward explaining Chinese novels,” I tell Chen, gazing dejectedly ahead. He is taking me back to the house of eight hi-theres.

As though sensing my urge to bolt, Chen seizes my arm. “This restaurant I think will be more to your enjoying.”

Again at half a furlong the double doors fly open and eight identical women explode into scarlet delight. When I open my eyes once more, we are inside the restaurant. The noise and smoke are even denser than before. Now ten minutes of intense negotiations—this is ordering in China—and Chen asks if I’d like to take a seat.

“I’d like to take a beer,” I reply, a bit dazed.

We claim the only available table, still covered in mountains of dinner detritus, the wooden chairs still warm. Chen orders two bottles of Hsingtao. “How long will you be in China?” he asks politely. That would be splendid question number four, unless it comes after how do you like Chinese food.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “I may decide to travel a little.”

“Oh! You must see Xi’an and Yunnan.”

I’ve no interest at all in Xi’an and its one thousand terra-cotta whatevers, but for some reason my ears prick up at the other mention. “Yunnan?”

Chen gestures toward the far end of the restaurant. “Yunnan Province. Southwest. Very far from Beijing. Yunnan is—what is the word? I think frontier.”

“China has a frontier?”

Chen watches me jot a note in my titanium-plated journal and says, “May I ask what you do, Mr. Mancer?”

“I write.”

His posture straightens. “Ah. You are here to write about China’s economic growth.”

“I’m not that kind of writer.”

Chen thinks for a moment. “Then you are here to write about preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games.”

I shake my head.

“I think you are being very modest,” says Chen with a smile. “Probably you write some very famous books in the USA.”

I picture my three very famous novels in discount bins, their upper right-hand corners missing. Shaking my head, I close my journal but don’t yet put it away.

“Please,” says Chen, “what are you writing about now?”

“Actually I’m here to visit my sister.”

After what seems a cool silence, Chen offers his pack of Panda cigarettes and I shake my head. Unhurriedly he lights up then smiles. “I think my countrymen will find your journal very interesting.”

“Oh?” I say.

“We Chinese are very affected by the written word. To study the old books is considered the greatest thing a man can do.”

Three uniformed Chinese did, in fact, take a very keen interest in my journal just this morning. I don’t think it was because they were very affected by the written word.

“In America,” I say, “a book is just an opinion. That makes an old book somebody’s outdated idea. You know something else? It’s a little smoky in here. My nose hairs are beginning to smolder.”

“Why don’t we wait outside?”

“Why don’t we wait outside?”

Chen and I push through the doors, and all eight uniformed girls gush a cathartic farewell. It’s all I can do to keep from cold-cocking the nearest of them.

Chen and I cast about for an appealing place to drain our beers. Finding none, we turn to face each other.

“May I ask what you do, Mr. Chen?”

With a slight bow, he says, “I teach International Politics at Peking University.”

“As soon as you understand America’s foreign policy,” I say, “I hope you’ll explain it to me.”

Chen laughs politely. “Fortunately American foreign policy is very easy to understand. Have you read Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century?”

I look away. “Missed that one.”

“Every American should read this,” says Chen. “It describes your country’s global policy very clearly.”

“So,” I say, “what is my country’s global policy?”

Chen composes himself before continuing. “According to this document, published in September of 2000, America will dominate the world by attacking every country strong enough to become a potential threat.”

“Attacking?” I say.

“Yes, with subversion and if necessary with the military.”

I look at him. “You say ‘every country.’ What about our allies?”

Chen shakes his head. “America will have no more allies. Your leaders believe that you are strong enough to no longer need them.”

“Perhaps I should read this book,” I say without conviction.

“It is not a book but a position paper written by some conservatives of your country. Several of those men are now in your White House. One is your secretary of state. Another is your vice-president.”

We exchange an uncertain gaze and I say, “This seems to concern you, Mr. Chen.”

He smiles softly. “China is a very powerful country. This can only mean that the United States will attack us very soon. We can only ask ourselves how it will come.”

A shout from the restaurant door.

“Your food is ready,” says Chen.

We duck once more beneath the eight cooing young women, their enthusiasm finally beginning to wane. Inside, Chen loads me down with plastic bags containing white boxes of something/anything, and I follow him back out through the doors and a final crimson chorus of farewells.

“In China,” says Chen, shaking my hand in the brown-out gloom, “we have a saying. ‘A wise rabbit has three openings to its den.’ May you always be this wise rabbit.”

I study the broad, impenetrable grin for a moment before muttering my thanks and turning toward the West Gate. I am hurried along by mingled scents of rice and veggies, shrimp and chicken, pork and bean sprouts. All that’s missing are fortune cookies, which the Chinese have never heard of. Just as well, I think. One more Chinese proverb would be exactly two too many.