China Mountain Zhang

Occasionally I am half awake, when Dr. Cui comes to see me I am fully awake, but mostly I am not. Dr. Cui explains that since my left kidney has ceased functioning and my right is badly damaged, they are keeping me as nearly suspended as possible. There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly.

'Dr. Cui,' I say, 'you are controlling my moods, aren't you.'

She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. 'Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn't you would be frightened and depressed. The unit,' she indicates my weighted left wrist, 'is feeding back into your nervous system. In a sense, you are not jacked into it, it is jacked into you. That's how we control your moments of consciousness, as well as your moods and stimulate the growth of your new kidneys. They are vascularized nicely, by the way. In a few days they will begin to take over. Your old kidneys will shut down and eventually will atrophy and be absorbed by your body.'

How exciting. I find it hard to maintain interest in what she is saying, or in anything. Back to nothing.

After three weeks I am released. I have lost seven kilos and my pants don't fit. My kidneys, my new kidneys that is, are functioning well, but I have been instructed to avoid things like beer and alcohol and to watch my salt intake. October, only a few days after October 1, National Day, the day the People's Republic of China was founded and here in the city the windows of some of the shops are still decorated in red and gold. I am assaulted by noise. Nanjing dialect, Mandarin, I am washed in Chinese. The people on the street are all well dressed and healthy looking. Everywhere, elegant men in black and red business tails, or casually dressed in coveralls. Women with sprays of light in their hair. Light displays hang suspended in front of windows, light sticks refract into images whenever I turn my head, characters flash across the backs of my eyes.

I stand waiting for the bus. I feel dizzy again, but it's not physical. I put my hand against the signpole. The bus coasts to a stop in front of me.

Xiao Chen is at the suite, and he has friends over.

'Zhang!' he says, then beaming to the others, 'See? I told you he existed.' I collapse into a chair, worn out from the effort of getting to the dorm. His friends begin the obligatory, 'You must be tired,' and I shake my head, no, no, please do not leave. 'Beer?' Xiao Chen asks in English, proud of himself.

'No,' I say politely in Mandarin, 'I cannot, new kidneys.'

They ask me how I am and Xiao Chen describes my spectacular collapse in the dining hall. He describes things I do not remember, says that when I came to I talked to him, but that my back hurt very badly and that I was very brave, He tells about medical coming and putting me out.

'I don't remember,' I say.

'I to hospital go, see you,' he says in clipped Singapore English, 'They say you sleep. I send to you flowers, they come not come?'

'Yellow ones?' I ask, I don't know the word for forsythia in Mandarin.

He beams. Introduces his friends. A couple are from Singapore, huaqiao, overseas Chinese, like Chen and I. Two are from Chengdu, Zhongguo ren, Chinese citizens. They sit and chatter and I stop trying to follow the conversation, just letting the sound wash over me, drinking tea. It is nice to be with people.

Oh, I am lonely. And it is all so strange. I miss Peter.

I am three weeks behind in my classes. For my lab on tool-handling this is no problem, I have more experience than most of the class. The cutters and sealers we use are often different makes than I am accustomed to, and the steps we learn in class a bit more formal than the way I am used to handling them, but I've used so many different makes it really doesn't bother me. We stand, fifteen of us in the lab, jacked in, and the teacher tells us to turn on the cutter. The tip of my cutter glows ready.

The class has been practicing controlling the width of the beam. The teacher says he wants the beam the width of a pencil, we are supposed to burn a hole through a piece of plastic. I heave three feet of cutter into position, rest the tip where I want the hole and fire a quick burst (plastic keeps melting a bit after the cutter shuts off so it's always good to do a bit too little.) Then I wait for fifteen minutes while everybody else practices and learns the texture and density of the plastic. I help the people on the left and right of me. The girl on the right keeps pulsing the cutter and has little keyhole shapes all over her piece of practice plastic.

For me the only real problem with the class is that I'm out of shape and the cutters are bulky.

The teacher suggests that I test out of the class, but it will probably be one of my two high marks so I respectfully decline. As a non-native speaker I also take Mandarin, poutonghua. Since many of the other non-natives are still augmented in our classes and we are not allowed to be augmented in this class, I do well. The teacher gives me books to read to improve my character vocabulary, my reading is not as good as my speaking.

It is the other classes, the math and engineering courses, that worry me. I have five courses, including an engineering lecture and an engineering lab. I'm going to be thirty in five months, I'm too old to be in school.

I am assigned a tutor for engineering, to help me make up the time I have lost. I am embarrassed. It is clearly my incompetence, they feel I am not quick enough to make it up on my own. It is low self-esteem, I am aware. I am alone, Chen has his circle of friends, it seems to me that in the four weeks I have lost, everyone else has adjusted.

I am unable to fathom engineering, so I go to my tutor, taking the lift to the bottom of the Dong- ta, the East Tower, where I live, crossing the arcade of shops that connects the overcity complex above the University to the Bei-ta, the North Tower, and taking the lift back up to the address I have been given. I knock on the door, and Yang Haibao opens it.

His eyes flicker down and up, very swiftly, and he smiles. He is smooth faced with a stiff brush of hair. 'Hello,' he says in Poutonghua, 'you are the man with the incredible name?'

'Zhang,' I answer. Lenin and Mao Zedong, my huaqiao name! 'I suffer for the sins of my parents,' I add, a glib response, a play on Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought which says the child is formed by the parents and the son of the landlord is also a landlord, even if he owns no land. Only after I have said it do I think, I am in China and I don't know this man and I watch to see if he is offended.

Not at all. He grins, 'Come in,' he says.

His dormitory. How can I say what it is like to walk into Haibao's dormitory? His name means 'Sea-wave' although a better translation is tidal wave. The room is blue and lightfish swim lazily near the ceiling, skeletons aglow. His room faces out, looking at the city-Chen's and my room faces into the inner wall-and the city is going to smoky twilight, so it seems as if the blue goes on and on. Furniture is soft, dusky shapes.

He waves his hand and the room programming picks up. Lightfish flicker into shadows and are gone and the light comes up, the window dims, and suddenly the room is bright. The furniture revealed shifts chameleon-like to rose and the pale yellow walls seem to be textured, like cotton.

'Nice room,' I say.

'Thanks,' he says. 'Can I get you a beer? Nanjing beer.'

Nanjing beer is supposed to be very good. 'Thank you, but I can't. New kidneys.'

'That's right, you've been sick,' he says.

I tell it briefly, tired already of explaining and not wanting to bore him. He makes me nervous. He is polished, his clothes casual and, to my eye, expensive. I think to myself I will remember that open shirt, the brushed gray tights, the calf high boots. Look for something like that. I wonder what he thinks of me in my American clothes, looking huaqiao and appearing with the outlandish name of Zhang Zhong Shan.

'How tiresome for you,' he says, with sympathy. 'How do you like China?'

I am ready to march out the platitudes but I don't. 'I don't know, I've spent most of the time here in bed.'

He laughs. My foolish heart, I am in love with him. This polished young man with his perfect clothes. He cannot be bent, I cannot be so lucky, and yet, and yet.

Does he dance? That's the way to tell. When a straight man meets a straight woman, they dance. When I meet someone bent, we dance. It is so subtle. I only know when I meet a straight man, he doesn't dance. It seems to me that Haibao and I are dancing, watching each other's faces a little longer, responding by looking away or swift nervous smiles. But this is China, maybe I'm crossing cultural signals. I'm lonely and I want this