off? He threw one question after another at his wife, who was no longer listening. He was getting old, after waiting for answers that his wife would not give him, the man thought sadly; he had fought in the war against the Japanese when he was a boy and he had seen plenty of bodies, but now he could not sleep because of a bucket of blood from a woman who was no longer alive. The story would make his old platoon friends laugh at the next reunion, the old man thought, and then he realized that he was the last one remaining who had not reported to the other side.
She had to die anyway, one of the two surgeons who had operated on Gu Shan told himself one more time—so it didn't matter, in the end, that they had changed the protocol because the patient did not believe in receiving something from a corpse and insisted that the prisoner be kept alive when the kidneys were removed. This was not the most challenging operation for him, but it would be the one to make him the chair of the surgery department, and put his wife into the position of head nurse in internal medicine, though she was still unaware of her promotion and would be overjoyed when she found out about it. It would also help their twin daughters, fourteen and a half and blossoming into a pair of young beauties, to get a recommendation from the city government so that they could go to an elite high school in the provincial capital. The man thought about his wife and his daughters—they were fast asleep in their innocent dreams, unplagued by death and blood; the burden was on his shoulders, the man of the household, and he found it hard not to ponder the day when he could no longer shelter them, the two daughters especially, from the ugliness of a world that they were in love with now, rosebudlike girls that they were. What then? he wondered, painfully aware of his limitations as a man trapped between practicality and conscience. In the end, he had to make himself believe that he had chosen the best for his family. The long-needed sleep rolled over him like a tide and washed him offshore.
In an army hospital a hundred miles away, medicine dripped into an old man's vein. He was surrounded by people congratulating themselves on the success of the transplant operation. And in Muddy River, in a hospital populated by many more patients and fewer doctors and nurses, sat Mrs. Gu, who was dozing off at the drip-drip of the saline solution into her husband's arm. Now and then she woke up and watched her husband's face, shrunken and suddenly too old for her to recognize.
SEVEN
“Now, now,” said the nanny finally, when Kai failed to pry Ming-Ming's small fingers off her hand. He screamed in protest when he was pulled out of Kai's arms, and the nanny caught the small wrist and shook it gently. “Ming- Ming will be a good boy. Wave to Mama and let Mama go to work. Without work Mama doesn't make money. Without money there is no food. Without food Ming-Ming's tummy will rumble. And when Ming-Ming's tummy rumbles Mama will be too sad to go to work.”
The girl had a way of talking in circles, her tone flat and unhurried, as if she was telling an old folktale that no longer held any suspense, and Ming-Ming always calmed down. In those moments Kai felt that the girl was innocent and mysterious at once, a child and an old woman sharing the space within her skinny body, neither aware of the other's existence.
Han came out of the bathroom, buttoning the last button on his Mao jacket. “Let Mama go to work, yes,” he said, and tickled Ming-Ming under his chin. “But your baba will make more than enough money even if Mama doesn't work. Aren't you a lucky boy?”
Ming-Ming turned away and hugged the nanny's neck, having already banished his parents from his world before he was abandoned for the day. The child's attachment and indifference, both absolute, were a mystery to Kai. She did not recall ever being close to her mother, an unhappy woman who had been easily disappointed by everything in her life: her husband's lack of social status, the three children close to their father but stingy with their affection for her, promotions given to her colleagues, the tedious life, year after year, in a provincial city. Han's mother, a shrewd woman who had been credited with both her husband's political career and her own—she had been a nurse in the civil war, and had tended several high-ranking officials—was attentive to Han's needs, a better mother than Kai's own perhaps, but Kai had never thought of apprenticing herself to her mother-in-law. Until Ming-Ming's birth Kai always had someone to rely on for advice, teachers for instruction at the theater school, an older actress as a mentor in the theater troupe, her father. In her new motherhood, she felt not much different from a young child in a fishermen's village—her father had once told her and her siblings about the practice in his hometown near the East Sea, where a boy, upon turning three, would be thrown into the sea without warning; the child was expected to use his instinct to stay afloat, and those who could not save themselves were banished from the fishing boats, to live out their humility onshore, mending fishing nets and harvesting air-dried fish and seaweeds from clotheslines among women. Life is a war, and one rests only when death comes to fetch him, Kai remembered her father saying. She looked at Ming-Ming's small limbs; in another life he would soon be expected to fight in his first battle.
Kai repeated to the nanny a few details about feeding and napping. The girl looked patient, and Kai wondered if the girl was eager for them to go to work so that she could mother Ming-Ming more capably than Kai could herself. When the girl had been hired, her parents had told Kai that, as the eldest daughter of the family, she had helped to bring up six siblings, the youngest not much older than Ming-Ming. She had become a mother before she had grown into adulthood, Kai thought now, and Ming-Ming's plump arms, circling the nanny's neck with trust and familiarity, reminded Kai how easy it could be to replace a mother with another loving person in a small child's life.
Han insisted on walking Kai to the studio. The well-orchestrated denunciation event of the day before and, more so, the successful transplant—by now Han felt little need to keep it a secret from Kai that a top official had received Gu Shan's kidneys, and that Han himself was to be praised for that—had made Han more talkative.
“Is that why her trial was expedited?” asked Kai.
Han smiled and said they need not be concerned about irrelevant details; they had more important things to look forward to now, he said, and when she asked him what he meant, more pointedly than she had intended, he brought up the possibility of a second baby.
But Ming-Ming was no more than an infant himself, Kai said. Han studied her face and told her not to be nervous. By the time his little sister was born Ming-Ming would be old enough to be a big brother, he said. Even before Ming-Ming Han had hoped for a daughter, though he knew a boy as the firstborn would please his parents more.
They might get another boy, Kai reminded Han.
“Then we'll have another baby. I won't stop until I get a daughter as beautiful as her mother.”
