Saving Fish From Drowning

  “No worries,” said the manager. He looked at the list of twelve names Bennie had given him, along with the stack of passports, and compared it with his records. “And Miss Bibi Chen, she is not here?”

  Bennie was blindsided to hear my name yet again. “She couldn’t come . . . a last-minute problem . . . I’m the tour leader now. My travel agent did notify you.”

  The man frowned. “Notify me?”

  “What I mean is, the office of tourism. It should say that in your records. It does, doesn’t it? . . .”

  “Yes, yes, I see that now. She had accident and is in hospital.” He looked up with another frown. “Terrible news.”

  “Yes.” (If only he knew how terrible.)

  “Please give greetings to her.”

  “I will.”

  “And welcome to you. This your first time in Ruili?”

  “Actually I’ve visited the area before,” Bennie lied, “though not Ruili itself.” He didn’t know if it was detrimental to admit he was a neophyte.

  “Excellent. May you have very good and happy stay with us.” Meanwhile, both Dwight and the Shih Tzu puppy had recovered sufficiently to be declared by Harry as having been “shooed away from death’s door.” Dwight’s face was now the color of algae. As soon as he arrived at the hotel, he crawled into his twin bed, assisted by Roxanne, who brought him a glass of boiled water, as prescribed by Dr. Harry. He took small sips, trying hard not to regurgitate, then lay down, and as Roxanne urged him to relax, he faded from sombre rêverie to sound sleep.

  Esmé’s purloined puppy was also in reverie. Pup-pup lay on her back, blissfully stretching her legs whenever Esmé scratched her belly. Marlena was touched by how happy her daughter was. She remembered a time in her own childhood when she had begged her father to let her keep a kitten she had found. Without a word to her, he took it from her arms, handed it to a servant, and told her to drown it; the servant, however, simply put it outside, and Marlena secretly fed it scraps for months, until one day it did not show up. Esmé was so like her. She was now coaxing the puppy to eat a watery gruel of rice and chicken, ordered by Harry and obtained by Marlena from the hotel’s kitchen staff. Marlena had reported that it was her daughter who was not feeling well and needed the special soup. A few American dollars convinced them of the veracity of this story. “Come on, Pup-pup,” Esmé said, and held the eyedropper to the Shih Tzu’s mouth, smacking her lips in further encouragement. Harry was most pleased in thinking they had become a family of sorts—for what was a family if not members of a crisis with a happy outcome?

  At seven, everyone except Pup-pup and Esmé went to meet Lulu in the lobby. Before she went out, Marlena gave strict instructions to Esmé not to leave the room. As Lulu had already warned them, dogs were not allowed in any hotel. Moreover, Lulu had told them that people were not permitted to keep dogs in China unless they possessed a license, which cost thousands of yuan, and in any case, to apply for a license one must have a permanent residence. Though the rules were only casually enforced, from time to time the local government went on a purge and rounded up all dogs whose owners had disobeyed the rules. As to what happened to the dogs, well, she didn’t want to say, except to caution, “Very bad, very bad result you don’t want to know.”

  “You don’t want to get caught,” Marlena said, and Esmé replied in her blandest voice, “Tell me about it.”

  “Wawa, promise-promise me you won’t leave the room. Promise?”

  Esmé sighed heavily. “Quit it, Mom. I’m not a wawa anymore. I know what to do. You don’t have to tell me.” She kept her eyes focused on the puppy. “Come on, Pup-pup, eat something. It’s good for you. . . .”

  Marlena left reluctantly. In the lobby, Lulu roused her charges like a cheerleader. “Is everybody hungry?”

  “Hungry,” they said in unison, then made for the door.

  As the bus took off, Lulu switched on the microphone. “I already telling you we call this town Ruili, yes, Ruili. But also is known as Shweli in Burmese, Shweli.” Several people turned to their seatmates and said in a monotone, “Shweli.”

  “To Dai people, Ruili means ‘foggy.’”

  “Foggy,” the passengers echoed mindlessly.

  “But some say this can mean ‘heavy mist’ . . .”

  “Mist.”

  “. . . or ‘fine drizzle.’”

  “Jizzle,” they said, imitating her pronunciation.

  “This misty drizzle sometimes will fall in only one small location—one block, one building—but across street it is dry, not one wet spot. Very unusual, you agree?”

  “Agree.”

  “Some local people make joke and say maybe this is urine from airplane passing by.” She pointed upward.

  And her guests looked at the sky, contemplating this possibility. In China, many notions previously thought to be impossible could not be so easily dismissed. Lulu laughed. “Joke! We only make joke.”

  Lulu instructed the driver to go through the “city center,” to give the tourists a quick idea of what downtown Ruili had to offer. She did this only because it was part of the itinerary required by the government’s efforts to infuse a little capital into local businesses. But Lulu had also seen the look of disappointment in many tourists’ eyes once they reached central Ruili. Most had added the visit to their itinerary only so they might say they had stuck a toe into Myanmar. In fact, there was a white wooden post on the outskirts of the town where you could stand with one half of your body in China and the other half in Myanmar. You did not need special permission to do this. So without going into Myanmar, you could claim you had been there. This tourist spot was where Lulu had been called upon a hundred times to take a picture. Usually her clients stood in contorted poses, legs in China, head and shoulders in Myanmar, or a couple might divide up and face each other from their respective chosen country, and stare at each other with binoculars from six inches apart.

  “Look at that,” she would tell each busload of tourists, pointing to a small house nearby. “There one family lives, kitchen is in China, bedroom is in Myanmar. In this way, this family eats in one country, sleeps in other. I think this house been standing there for many centuries, yes, long time, before anyone decided where one country stops, the other starts.”

  Dwight, still gray in the face, looked at the surrounding landscape. He pictured it as it might have been more than a hundred years earlier, when his great-great-grandfather had come to this part of the world. Perhaps he, too, had entered Burma via the silk route and had passed this way station. Back then, it must have been a beautiful outpost of green mountains and rainforests, ambling waterways and profuse wildflowers, unmarred by barriers and signs.

  I, too, could imagine it. By virtue of its geographical fates—the lucky juxtaposition of a river between two countries—this was a natural stopping point for thinking about what you were moving toward and what you were leaving behind. Fur traders, warriors, and refugees had come to this northern end of the trail. Which offered more opportunities, the Middle Kingdom or Old Mian?

  And here the town still stood. The relics of ancient temples were overshadowed by a bland mix of high-rise hotels, one-story shops, and streets widened and developed so quickly that the surrounding land had been stripped of all signs of vegetation. Neon had replaced sunsets.

  From the bus, my friends passed low buildings with long porches, where men, women, and children squatted on low stools. A pregnant Pekingese dog lay sprawled on a green plastic chair. Merchants beckoned to passersby to view their supplies of TVs, mattresses, stereos, rice cookers, and Lilliputian refrigerators. The shops were open at all hours, for who knew when the parvenus might have a notion to augment their status with goods of such high quality.

  A few blocks later, my friends were passing the pink-light district, a lane of one-room open-air shops, each lit by a pink bulb and emblazoned with advertisements: “Karaoke, massage, $40, best lamb included.”

  Rupert looked up from his paperback. “What do they do with the
lamb?” he asked coyly.

  Lulu was embarrassed to say. “This is new expression,” she tried to explain. “‘Best lamb’ . . . like saying, ‘We must be careful.’”

  “You mean they use condoms,” Rupert said flatly, and Moff tried not to look surprised. Rupert attended a high school where students were encouraged to talk openly about safe sex. And though he acted unfazed by sex, he had yet to experience it. He had once groped a girl at a sleepover party where everyone was drunk.

  “Very good,” Lulu told Rupert. “Everyone in every country is concerning safety.” As a government worker, she was not supposed to mention the high rate of AIDS in this town. In Ruili, opium slipped through the border like dirty water through a colander, and hence needle-borne illnesses passed back and forth between the two countries with similar ease. Anyone could see that addicts were plentiful among all those young women of the pink-lit “beauty parlors.” I say “women,” but perhaps it’s best to describe them as girls. Many had been abducted from small villages at the age of twelve or thirteen and drugged into compliance. The lighting gave them a healthier glow, but one needed only to look at their meatless legs and arms to see that some were being eaten away by AIDS. A few sported short hairdos, having sold their locks to wig buyers. Quick kwai were always necessary when business was slow and the habit too strong. But you could cut your long hair only once.

  When it came to vices, China could not stem the tide; it had to stanch it the way one daubs a bleeding artery. Prostitution was illegal, but in plain sight on nearly every block. In Ruili, there was more supply than demand. At most of the shops, two or three teenaged girls with bored faces sat on sectional sofas. They watched soap operas and game shows on television. The busier girls served drinks to their customers. The men, full of bluster, preferred to go in groups as if it were a competitive sport, each one having a go at the same girl. And in some shops there was only an empty storefront. The work took place behind the curtains, where there was a cot, a chair, a basin, and a single towel for washing up. Clothes-off was extra.

  The bus turned a corner. “Over there,” Lulu called out, and pointed to a shop where a man and a woman were seated at computers. “Internet café. Twelve kwai for forty-five minutes. Last chance. Once you go into Myanmar, no more Internet. Is not allow.” Rupert made a mental note to return here.

  The bus left town and went down darkened roads for several miles until it reached a restaurant consisting of two open-air pavilions, illuminated only by blue Christmas lights. Feast now, slim down later, I would have advised my friends. The food in Myanmar can be terribly monotonous, no matter how luscious the surroundings. Some people have told me I am just biased with my Chinese palate.

  The restaurant owner approached Lulu and Bennie. “How lucky you came tonight,” he said in Chinese. “As you can see, we are not too busy right now.” There were no other customers. “So we can make special things,” he went on, “the kinds of foods that foreigners like.”

  What “foreigners like”! These were the very words I was most afraid to hear. Lulu merely smiled and translated to Bennie what the restaurant owner had said. Bennie did a most peculiar form of thanks—clasping both hands in front and bowing rapidly and stiffly, like a man in a movie, who is begging the king not to behead him. “Obsequious” is the word I am thinking of. The owner shot off a list of dishes made of cheap ingredients, topped off with plenty of Chinese beer. He scribbled the price on a scrap of paper and shoved that under Bennie’s nose. I, too, looked. Was the food made of gold, carved of jade? Bennie performed the curious life-sparing bow again. “Wonderful, wonderful.”

  Looking out toward the darkening field, Wendy saw shapes moving. “What’s that?”

  “Brr,” the owner said. This was his best English approximation of “Burmese.”

  “Birds,” Lulu translated what she thought the owner was trying to say, and he nodded in gratitude. “Here in this part of China, many animals and birds, all year round. Those birds, we call egrets, have long neck, long leg.”

  Wendy and Wyatt squinted. “Oh, I see them,” Wendy said. “See? There.” She pointed them out for her lover, grabbing his hand under the table and placing it on her crotch. He nodded.

  But the shadowy forms were not egrets. As the restaurant owner had tried to indicate, they were Burmese farmers, women to be exact, their backs hunched over, wearing bright pastel tops and thick flesh-colored stockings that protected them against leeches and the razor-edge stalks of sugarcane. They were working the fields, hacking the cane with long sharp knives. Whack, and off came the flowery lilac tops. With each slash they moved forward, six inches at a time. December and late spring were the two planting seasons, and winter the better of those two. The women now had only a short time to clear the harvest and get the fields ready.

  Lulu finally saw that the shadows were people. She corrected herself. “Ah, sorry, these are not birds. Yes, now I see, they are probably Japanese people making secret ritual.”

  “Spies?”

  “Oh no, ha, ha, not spies. They are Japanese tourists. In World War Two time, very famous battle happened here, very fierce, terrible. This is key location for Japanese and KMT, because this is major entryway to Burma, where they are also occupying.”

  Wendy was lost. “KMT?”

  “Kuomintang army,” Marlena explained.

  “Right.” Wendy nodded, though she had no idea with which side the Kuomintang army had been. She wrongly assumed they were the Communists instead of the Nationalists. You see how it is in American high schools: almost nothing is said about the Second World War in China, save for the American Flying Tigers, because that sounds romantic.

  “Because many Japanese died here,” Lulu went on, “they are coming here to make a pilgrimage. . . .”

  Now I knew what Lulu was talking about. There was indeed a major battle, and the Japanese suffered a big loss. Many fell in these fields, and that’s where they remained. Their relatives come to this site to honor their family members, to stand where they are likely still buried. They are not allowed to do this, however. They cannot openly honor a soldier who tried to kill Chinese people so that Japan could rule China. China has a long memory. But no one complains if they come at night and do this quietly. So it’s a true story, but still Lulu was not right. They were not Japanese tourists, but sugarcane cutters, as the restaurant owner had said.

  “The shadows in the field,” Lulu said, “maybe they are wives, daughters, sons, even grandsons.”

  Or the dead soldiers themselves, Heidi imagined. Ghosts in the field.

  “Cool,” Rupert said. “How many were killed?”

  “Thousands,” Lulu guessed.

  Heidi saw thousands of Japanese soldiers lying in the field, blood oozing into the dirt, turning it to reddish mud. And from this rich soil sprang ghosts like stalks of sugarcane. She stared at the hunched-over figures and imagined they were scavenging for bones and skulls as mementos. When the food arrived, she could only stare at the heaping platters.

  Because the lighting was so poor, none of my friends could make out what was on the platters. They had to trust Lulu’s explanation of what lay before them. “This is snow peas, mushrooms, some kind of meat, ah yes, beef, I think. . . . And this one, this is rice wrapped in a banana leaf. . . .” They tentatively began poking away, ladling food from the mounds onto their plates.

  Heidi could still hear the pig screaming before it was slaughtered. She had decided right then to stop eating flesh of any kind. Now she wondered about the vegetables. Where had they been grown? Out there? Had blood leached into their roots? Had the bodies of soldiers served as the mulch? She had read in a gardening magazine that the degree of sweetness in vegetables depended a great deal on the mulch that was used. You could measure it on a Brix scale. The richer the soil, the higher the sugar content in what grew there. Incredible tomatoes, like the kind she bought at the Farmers Market on the weekends, had an advertised level of 13 to 18 on a Brix scale. Store-bought tomatoes, the farmers to
ld her, were not even half that. And what about the vegetables in Ruili? Were they sweet? Didn’t blood taste sickly-sweet?

  HEIDI HAD SEEN pooled blood from a dead man, one of her housemates. That was ten years back, when she was a freshman at UC Berkeley. The six of them lived in a ramshackle house in Oakland. The newest was a guy who had answered one of the “Roommate Wanted” signs pinned on the bulletin board at the Co-op grocery store and Cody’s Books. He was a twenty-two-year-old guy from Akron, Ohio, nicknamed “Zoomer.” She had enjoyed a few philosophical discussions with him late at night. One night, the housemates went to a Pearl Jam concert, all except Zoomer. When the concert was over, some wanted to go to a bar. She elected to go home. She found the door unlocked when she got there, and this made her angry, because somebody or another was always careless about that. And when she walked farther into the living room, she was overcome by a terrible odor. It was not blood, but sweat, the essence of animal pain and fear. She did not remember seeing the body, calling the police, or their arrival, the investigation, the removal of the body. The next day, she saw only the pool of blood, the yellow tape at the front door, and she smelled him. How bizarre that his smell hung in the air after he had died. It was like a lingering message, as if he were still begging for his life. She saw in her mind’s eye his last moments, the intruder’s gun pointed at his face.

  Heidi had known him for only a few months, so no one thought she could be too affected by his death. It was ghastly, everyone agreed, her finding the body like that. And she had every right to be freaked out for a while. But she seemed very calm when she told people what had happened. “I could tell he was already dead.” She did not go into detail, and people dared not ask, although they were curious to know. Roxanne cried when Heidi told her what had happened. Because of their age difference, Roxanne had treated Heidi more like a distant niece. But this was the turning point that made them close as half sisters—as sisters. Roxanne had imagined that Heidi was nearly murdered as well. She urged her to confide in her, to let her know if she needed to get counseling or move to another house. She could even stay with her and Dwight, the younger guy she was about to marry. But Heidi said she was fine. She had been clear-eyed and matter-of-fact, surprising even herself. Heidi had always been sensitive, openly bursting into tears when teased or injured.