“So, how did you two meet?” Wise asked, meaning Yu and the Cardinal.
“That was Fa An’s doing,” the Cardinal explained. “It was he who came to us to extend a greeting to a newcomer in the same—same line of work, one could say.” DiMilo was tempted to say that they enjoyed drinks together, but refrained for fear of demeaning the man before his fellow Baptists, some of whom objected to alcohol in any form. “As you might imagine, there are not so many Christians in this city, and what few there are need to stick together.”
“Do you find it odd, a Catholic and a Baptist to be so friendly?”
“Not at all,” Yu replied at once. “Why should it be odd? Are we not united by faith?” DiMilo nodded agreement at this perfect, if unanticipated, statement of belief.
“And what of your congregation?” Wise asked the Chinese minister next.
The bicycle lot outside was a confused mass of metal and rubber, for few of the Chinese workers owned automobiles, but as Quon helped Lien-Hua to the far corner, the two of them were spotted by someone who did have access to one. He was a factory security guard who drove about the perimeter of the plant very importantly in his three-wheel motorized cart, an accessory more important to his sense of status than his uniform and badge. Like Quon, a former sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, he’d never lost his feeling of personal authority, and this communicated itself in the way he spoke to people.
“Stop!” he called from the driver’s seat in his cart. “What goes on here?”
Quon turned. Lien-Hua had just been hit with another contraction, with buckled knees and gasping breath, and he was almost dragging her to their bikes. Suddenly, he knew that this wasn’t going to work. There was just no way that she could pedal her own bike. It was eleven blocks to their apartment. He could probably drag her up the three flights of steps, but how the hell was he going to get her to the front door?
“My wife is ... she’s hurt,” Quon said, unwilling—afraid—to explain what the problem really was. He knew this guard—his name was Zhou Jingjin—and he seemed a decent enough chap. “I’m trying to get her home.”
“Where do you live, Comrade?” Zhou asked.
“Great Long March Apartments, number seventy-four,” Quon replied. “Can you help us?”
Zhou looked them over. The woman seemed to be in some distress. His was not a country which placed great value on personal initiative, but she was a comrade in difficulty, and there was supposed to be solidarity among the people, and their apartment was only ten or eleven blocks, hardly fifteen minutes even in this slow and awkward cart. He made his decision, based on socialist worker solidarity.
“Load her on the back, Comrade.”
“Thank you, Comrade.” And Quon got his wife there, lifted her bottom up, and set her on the rusted steel deck behind the driver’s compartment. With a wave, he signaled Zhou to head west. This contraction proved a difficult one. Lien-Hua gasped and then cried out, to the distress of her husband, and worse, the distress of the driver, who turned and saw what ought to have been a healthy woman grasping her abdomen in great pain. It was not a pretty thing to see by any stretch of the imagination, and Zhou, having taken one leap of initiative, decided that maybe he ought to take another. The path to Great Long March Apartments led down Meishuguan Street, past the Longfu Hospital, and like most Beijing teaching hospitals, this one had a proper emergency-receiving room. This woman was in distress, and she was a comrade, like himself a member of the working class, and she deserved his help. He looked back. Quon was doing his best to comfort his woman as a man should, far too busy to do much of anything as the security cart bumped along the uneven streets at twenty kilometers per hour.
Yes, Zhou decided, he had to do it. He turned the steering tiller gently, pulled up to the loading dock designed more for delivery trucks than ambulances, and stopped.
It took Quon a few seconds to realize that they’d stopped. He looked around, ready to help his wife off the cart, until he saw that they weren’t at the apartment complex. Disoriented by the previous thirty minutes of unexpected emergency and chaos, he didn’t understand, didn’t grasp where they were, until he saw someone in a uniform emerge from the door. She wore a white bandanna-hat on her head—a nurse? Were they at the hospital? No, he couldn’t allow that.
Yang Quon stood off the cart and turned to Zhou. He started to object that they’d come to the wrong place, that he didn’t want to be here, but the hospital workers had an unaccustomed sense of industry at the moment—the emergency room was perversely idle at the moment—and a wheeled gurney emerged from the door with two men in attendance. Yang Quon tried to object, but he was merely pushed aside by the burly attendants as Lien-Hua was loaded on the gurney and wheeled inside before he could do much more than flap his mouth open and closed. He took a breath and rushed in, only to be intercepted by a pair of clerks asking for the information they needed to fill out their admitting forms, stopping him dead in his tracks as surely as a man with a loaded rifle, but far more ignominiously.
In the emergency room itself, a physician and a nurse watched as the orderlies loaded Lien-Hua onto an examining table. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for their trained eyes to make the first guess, which they shared with a look. Only a few seconds more and her work clothes had been removed, and the pregnant belly was as obvious as a sunrise. It was similarly obvious that Yang Lien-Hua was in frank labor, and that this was no emergency. She could be wheeled to the elevator and taken to the second floor, where there was a sizable obstetrics staff. The physician, a woman, beckoned to the orderlies and told them where to move the patient. Then she walked to the phone to call upstairs and tell them that a delivery was on the way up. With that “work” done, the doctor went back to the physicians’ lounge for a smoke and a magazine.
ComradeYang?" another clerk, a more senior one, said. ”Yes?" the worried husband replied, still stuck in the waiting room, held prisoner by clerks.
“Your wife is being taken upstairs to obstetrics. But,” the clerk added, “there’s one problem.”
“What is that?” Quon asked, knowing the answer, but hoping for a miracle, and utterly trapped by the bureaucratic necessities of the moment.
“We have no record of your wife’s pregnancy in our files. You are in our health district—we show you at Number Seventy-two Great Long March Flats. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s where we live,” Quon sputtered out, trying to find a way out of this trap, but not seeing one anywhere.
“Ah.” The clerk nodded. “I see. Thank you. I must now make a telephone call.”
It was the way the last statement was delivered that frightened Quon: Ah, yes, I have to see that the trash is removed properly. Ah, yes, the glass is broken, and I’ll try to find a repairman. Ah, yes, an unauthorized pregnancy, I’ll call upstairs so that they’ll know to kill the baby when it crowns.
Upstairs, Lien-Hua could see the difference in their eyes. When Ju-Long had been on his way, there’d been joy and anticipation in the eyes of the nurses who oversaw her labor. You could see their eyes crinkle with smiles at the corners of their masks ... but not this time. Someone had come over to where she was in labor room #3 and said something to the nurse, and her head had turned rapidly to where Lien-Hua lay, and her eyes had turned from compassionate to ... something else, and while Mrs. Yang didn’t know what other thing it was, she knew the import. It might not be something the nurse particularly liked, but it was something she would assist in doing, because she had to. China was a place where people did the things they had to do, whether they approved it or liked it or not. Lien-Hua felt the next contraction. The baby in her uterus was trying to be born, not knowing that it was racing to its own destruction at the hands of the State. But the hospital staffers knew. Before, with Ju-Long, they’d been close by, not quite hovering, but close enough to watch and see that things were going well. Not now. Now they withdrew, desiring not to hear the sounds of a mother struggling to bring forth death in a sm
all package.
On the first floor, it was equally plain to Yang Quon. What came back to him now was his firstborn son, Ju-Long, the feel of his small body in his arms, the little noises he made, the first smile, sitting up, crawling, the first step in their small apartment, the first words he’d spoken ... but their little Large Dragon was dead now, never to be seen again, crushed by the wheel of a passenger bus. An uncaring fate had ripped that child from his arms and cast him aside like a piece of blowing trash on the street—and now the State was going to slay his second child. And it would all happen upstairs, less than ten meters away, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.... It was a feeling not unknown to citizens of the People’s Republic, where rule from above was the rule, but opposed to it now was the most fundamental of human drives. The two forces battled within the mind of factory worker Yang Quon. His hands shook at his sides as his mind struggled with the dilemma. His eyes strained, staring at nothing closer than the room’s wall, but straining even so ... something, there had to be something ...
There was a pay telephone, and he did have the proper coins, and he did remember the number, and so Yang Quon lifted the receiver and dialed the number, unable to find the ability within himself to change fate, but hoping to find that ability in another.
I’ll get it," Reverend Yu said in English, rising and walking to where it was ringing.
“A remarkable guy, isn’t he?” Wise asked the two Catholics.
“A fine man,” Cardinal DiMilo agreed. “A good shepherd for his flock, and that is all a man can hope to be.”
Monsignor’s Schepke’s head turned when he caught the tone of Yu’s voice. Something was wrong here, and by the sound, something serious. When the minister returned to the sitting room, his face told the tale.
“What is amiss?” Schepke asked in his perfect Mandarin. Perhaps this was not something for the American reporters.
“One of my congregation,” Yu replied, as he reached for his jacket. “She is pregnant, in labor even now—but her pregnancy is unauthorized, and her husband fears the hospital will try to kill it. I must go to help.”
“Franz, was gibt’s hier?” DiMilo asked in German. The Jesuit then replied in Attic Greek to make damned sure the Americans wouldn’t get it.
“You’ve been told about this, Eminence,” Monsignor Schepke explained in the language of Aristotle. “The abortionists here commit what is virtually murder in any civilized country in the world, and the decision to do so, in this case, is purely political and ideological. Yu wishes to go and help the parents prevent this vile act.”
DiMilo needed less than a second. He stood, and turned his head. “Fa An?”
“Yes, Renato?”
“May we come with you and assist? Perhaps our diplomatic status will have practical value,” His Eminence said, in badly accented but comprehensible Mandarin.
It didn’t take long for Reverend Yu either: “Yes, a fine idea! Renato, I cannot allow this child to die!”
If the desire to procreate is the most fundamental known to mankind, then there are few more powerful calls to action for an adult than child-in-danger. For this, men race into burning buildings and jump into rivers. For this now, three clergymen would go to a community hospital to challenge the power of the world’s most populous nation.
“What’s happening?” Wise asked, surprised by the sudden shifts in language and the way the three churchmen had leapt to their feet.
“A pastoral emergency. A member of Yu’s congregation is in the hospital. She needs him, and we will go with our friend to assist in his pastoral duties,” DiMilo said. The cameras were still running, but this was the sort of thing that got edited out. But what the hell, Wise thought.
“Is it far? Can we help? Want us to run you over?”
Yu thought it over and quickly decided that he couldn’t make his bike go as fast as the American news van. “That is very kind. Yes.”
“Well, let’s go, then.” Wise stood and motioned to the door. His crew broke down their gear in a matter of seconds and beat them all out the door.
Longfu Hospital turned out to be less than two miles away, facing a north-south street. It was, Wise thought, a place designed by a blind architect, so lacking in aesthetic as to be a definite government-owned building even in this country. The communists had probably killed off anyone with a sense of style back in 1950 or so, and no one had attempted to take his place. Like most reporters, the CNN team came in the front door in the manner of a police SWAT team. The cameraman’s tool was up on his shoulder, with the soundman beside him, Barry Wise and the producer trailing while they looked for good establishing shots. To call the lobby dreary was generous. A Mississippi state prison had a better atmosphere than this, to which was added the disinfectant smell that makes dogs cringe in the vet’s office and made kids hug your neck harder for fear of the coming needle.
For his part, Barry Wise was unnaturally alert. He called it his Marine training, though he’d never seen combat operations. But one January night in Baghdad, he’d started looking out the windows forty minutes before the first bombs had fallen from the Stealth fighters, and kept looking until what U.S. Air Force planners had called the AT&T Building took the first spectacular hit. He took the producer’s arm and told him to keep his head up. The other ex-Marine nodded agreement. For him it was the suddenly grim looks on the faces of the three clergymen, who’d been so genial until the phone had rung. For that old Italian guy to look this way—it had to be something, they both were sure, and whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pleasant, and that often made for a good news story, and they were only seconds from their satellite uplink. Like hunters hearing the first rustle of leaves in the forest, the four CNN men looked alertly for the game and the shot.
“Reverend Yu!” Yang Quon called, walking—almost running—to where they were.
“Eminence, this is my parishioner, Mr. Yang.”
“Buon giorno,” DiMilo said in polite greeting. He looked over to see the newsies taking their pictures and keeping out of the way, more politely than he’d expected them to do. While Yu spoke with Yang, he walked over to Barry Wise to explain the situation.
“You are right to observe that relations between the Catholics and the Baptists are not always as friendly as they ought to be, but on this issue we stand as one. Upstairs, the officials of this government wish to kill a human baby. Yu wants to save that child. Franz and I will try to help.”
“This could get messy, sir,” Wise warned. “The security personnel in this country can play rough. I’ve seen it before.”
DiMilo was not an imposing man in physical terms. He was short and a good thirty pounds overweight, the American figured. His hair was thinning. His skin was sagging with age. He probably went out of breath going up two flights of stairs. But for all that, the Cardinal summoned what manhood he had and transformed himself before the American’s eyes. The genial smile and gentle disposition evaporated like steam in cold air. Now he looked more like a general on a battlefield.
“The life of an innocent child is at risk, Signore Wise,” was all DiMilo said, and it was all he had to say. The Cardinal walked back to his Chinese colleague.
“Get that?” Wise asked his cameraman, Pete Nichols.
“Fuckin’ A, Barry!” the guy said behind his eyepiece.
Yang pointed. Yu headed that way. DiMilo and Schepke followed. At the reception desk, the head clerk lifted a phone and made a call. The CNN crew followed the others into the stairwell and headed up to the second floor.
If anything, the obstetrics and gynecology floor was even more drab than the first. They heard the shouts, cries, and moans of women in labor, because in China, the public-health system did not waste drugs on women giving birth. Wise caught up to see that Yang guy, the father of the baby, standing still in the corridor, trying to identify the cries of his own wife from all the others. Evidently, he failed. Then he walked to the nurse’s desk.
Wise didn’t need to understand Chinese to get what
the exchange was all about. Yang was supported by Reverend Yu and demanded to know where his wife was. The head nurse asked what the hell they were doing here, and told them all that they had to leave at once! Yang, his back straight with dignity and fear, refused and repeated his question. Again the head nurse told him to get lost. Then Yang seriously broke the rules by reaching across the high countertop and grabbing the nurse. You could see it in her eyes. It shocked her at a very fundamental level that anyone could defy her state-issued authority so blatantly. She tried to back away, but his grip was too strong, and for the first time she saw that his eyes were no longer a display of fear. Now they showed pure killing rage, because for Yang human instincts had cast aside all the societal conditioning he’d absorbed in his thirty-six years. His wife and child were in danger, and for them, right here and right now, he’d face a fire-breathing dragon barehanded and be damned to the consequences! The nurse took the easy way out and pointed to the left. Yang headed that way, Yu and the other two clergy with him, and the CNN crew trailing. The nurse felt her neck and coughed to get her breath back, still too surprised to be fearful, trying to understand how and why her orders had been disregarded.
Yang Lien-Hua was in Labor Room #3. The walls were of yellow glazed brick, the floor tile of some color that had been overcome by years of use, and was now a brown-gray.
For “Lotus Flower,” it had been a nightmare without end. Alone, all alone in this institution of life and death, she’d felt the contractions strengthen and merge into one continuous strain of her abdominal muscles, forcing her unborn child down the birth canal, toward a world that didn’t want it. She’d seen that in the nurses’ faces, the sorrow and resignation, what they must have seen and felt elsewhere in the hospital when death came to take a patient. They’d all learned to accept it as inevitable, and they tried to step away from it, because what had to be done was so contrary to all human instincts that the only way they could be there and see it happen was to—to be somewhere else. Even that didn’t work, and though they scarcely admitted it even to one another, they’d go home from work and lie in their beds and weep bitterly at what they as women had to do to newborns. Some would cradle the dead children who never were, who never got to take that first life-affirming breath, trying to show womanly gentleness to someone who would never know about it, except perhaps the spirits of the murdered babies who might have lingered close by. Others went the other way, tossing them into bins like the trash the state said they were. But even they never joked about it—in fact, never talked about it, except perhaps to note it had been done, or, maybe, “There’s a woman in Number Four who needs the shot.”