Bobcat and Other Stories (10 page)

The Vietnamese had publicly announced that they would use their homemade weapons against anybody who came for them. Relief workers and guards inside the camps reported that each night they fell asleep to the steady grinding sound of metal being sharpened into weapons.

One week in early July, Margaret Thatcher visited Hong Kong. The Vietnamese had asked that she come to the camps on her visit so that they could discuss their situation with her, but she had refused. Late on a Friday afternoon Albert took Min and me up in a small government jet to see what the Vietnamese had done to protest her refusal. The sky was cloudless, the sun a bright pink. We drank beer, circling, sweeping over the city. At first I didn’t see it when Albert pointed, but then it caught the sun and sparkled. Along the silver roofs was spelled out in white stones. “Thatcher has no heart.”

Albert shook his head sadly. From this distance you could see his entire problem mapped out. In the troubled, sun-gilded water surrounding Hong Kong hundreds of people were bobbing in small boats, waiting, begging Albert and his colleagues to let them in. But if he did, they would be held in the crowded camps as illegal immigrants and treated worse than prisoners.

From here repatriation might seem to be the only answer. Min asked, “Do you think we’ll end up sending them back?”

“No,” Albert said. “No. I couldn’t live with myself if we did that.”

After the plane landed, I walked behind Min and Albert across the tarmac. I didn’t want to intrude on their conversation. Watching them, I was surprised again by the severity of Albert’s limp. He put his arm around Min and walked straighter. The two had a private understanding, an understanding of happiness. Each wanted the other to be happy and content, and each knew that the way to make the other happy was to be happy himself. This straining toward happiness in the midst of a difficult summer gave their home an aura of warmth and cheer, with a subtle undercurrent of sadness. Only once had I seen Albert falter in this regard. On a bright afternoon he had burst onto the roof with a letter fluttering in his hand. He handed it to Min in the whirlpool. The two men laughed and shook hands. The letter announced that they would be receiving special passports that would allow them to leave Hong Kong if things got brutal when the Chinese government took over, in 1997. Only fifty thousand families would receive these. But then, while they were congratulating each other, Albert began to choke up, and eventually he cried openly. Min leaped out of the pool and stood beside his father, patting him on his back. After his father went inside, I asked, “Why is he crying?”

“He is ashamed of his privilege.”

“Hmm.”

“Only a man who hates his privilege can be trusted with it.”

IN JULY, I BEGAN
the interviews. Outside I could see the relentless waves of heat, but inside, cool lavender air was piped into my office. I actually enjoyed the interviews, though my method of choosing became more and more arbitrary.

A few women I could write off immediately. Some seemed too passive, others had a hostile edge, and a fair number actually asked me not to choose them, because they were doing this only to please their mothers and fathers. Most of the women I genuinely liked. One woman was so lovely that my heart skipped the moment she entered the room. One woman was unbearably funny; I met her twice, and both times I was reduced to tears of laughter. A few were such extreme overachievers at such a young age that I interviewed them very carefully, with my own motives, looking for clues, secrets of personality. But usually my personality sketches, compared with the grandmother’s, were vague and dull—“Seems nice, dignified, beautiful, articulate.”

The only time I was able even to approach the grandmother’s divination and intuition was when I described my new friend Rapti to myself.
Not Chinese,
I thought,
but Filipino. Possesses strong heart. Loves a just God, and children. Industrious. Lives in apricot light.

RAPTI ASKED, A GLEAM
in her eye, “Have you found a wife yet for your corrupt little Min?” It was close to midnight. We were sitting on a large rock on a rocky beach. Behind Asia Foodstore was a long, thin stairway that led down through the trees to the water. I often walked here late at night if Min went to bed early. Sometimes Rapti joined me. She had a small Walkman that she could play without the headphones. We’d listen to Michael Jackson over and over and sometimes Madonna. Those two tapes, the songs on them, still have more power and melancholy for me than any music I’ve heard since. Huge pieces of Styrofoam continually washed up in that bay, and in the moonlight, as they rolled awkwardly through the waves, they were florescent and beautiful.

“You know,” I said, “you should meet Min. You’d really like him.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” she said.

“Perhaps we could all just meet one day, go for a walk together.”

We had waded out to this rock about an hour earlier, and the tide had risen. Dead fish floated all around, studded with silver lichen, like jewelry.

“Forget it, Sarah,” she said. “Even if I agreed to meet him, which I won’t, you can bet your life Min would not be interested in me.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Chinese hate Filipinos, the same as they hate the Vietnamese. We’re either maids or their drivers.”

“Min isn’t like that,” I said.

“If this Min is such an excellent man, why don’t you fall in love with him yourself?” She looked at me provocatively, and then stood up to go, smoothing her skirt with her hands.

This suggestion startled me. “Rapti!” I said. “Of course I can’t fall in love with him.” I couldn’t explain that the way I felt about Min was the same way I felt about her. I looked up at her. Her hair, not in its usual braids, whipped around. I felt a stab of longing. I liked everything about her. When she spoke, she was funny and smart. She was strong; I had seen her throw the huge baby into the air and catch him easily. And when she fell silent, as now, staring over the bay in the direction of her cluster of islands, I couldn’t help wondering and wanting to know exactly what she was thinking.

A COUPLE OF WEEKS
later, as Min and I stood in line for a movie, I said, “Min, you would consider marrying someone of a different nationality, wouldn’t you?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I am of mixed heritage myself.”

“Good,” I said. “I want you to meet a friend I have made.”

“A friend?”

“Rapti, the woman I told you about who works down the street?”

“The amah? The Filipino amah?”

“Yes,” I said defensively.

Min had his hands in his pockets. He rocked back and forth on his heels. It was a cool, breezy night. The couple in front of us in line were silent, and they seemed to be waiting for Min’s answer as well.

“Well, it’s really just not done,” Min said.

“What do you mean?”

“The Chinese and the Filipinos have a bitter history,” he said. “It would be a lot to overcome.”

“Rapti would say it was prejudice, not animosity.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted.

“But you will meet her?” I said.

“Of course I will meet any friend of yours. But Sarah, really, you don’t need to take this job seriously. It’s a formality, that’s all.”

“I know,” I said. “I just want you to meet her. We could all be friends.”

But throughout the movie I was planning the meeting place. The grandmother had written in her notes, “Himalayan Lada will meet Albert in meadowland. Quiet enough for the future to be seen. Sky of birds. Sage moss and high willows, and a house that has not been entered for over one hundred years.”

AT THE END OF
August, at the close of the rainy season and one week before I was to return to America, a fight broke out at the camp Chi Ma Wan when Hong Kong police went in to check for weapons. The Vietnamese had carved spears out of tent pegs, and knives from metal bed slats. They stoned the police, until the police retaliated with a tear gas whose concentration blinded several children. Fourteen Vietnamese were seriously injured, and one was dead. When news of this spread to other camps, seven Vietnamese men in different camps disemboweled themselves in protest.

As this occurred, I was writing, in a careful yet uninspired calligraphy, the names of the seven women I thought most appropriate for Min to consider for marriage. I wasn’t by any means satisfied that my choices were significantly more appropriate than the others, but I was relieved to have finished the job. As for Rapti, she still refused to meet Min.

That night I was dreaming of Min when he actually appeared above me, peering down into my face. “Sarah,” he said, “wake up. Dad hasn’t come home yet; it’s already one a.m.”

“Yeah?” I said, still too nearly asleep to guess what that might mean.

“I think tonight’s the night.”

“The night?”

“I think they’re going back tonight.”

“To Hanoi?” I said.

“Yes. I think we should go to the airport.”

“Okay.” I sat up.

“We have no car.”

“I’ll call Rapti.”

“Ah, the stubborn Rapti,” he said, and smiled.

Rapti picked us up in the Canadians’ car. I got in the front seat and Min got in the back. He reached his hand forward to Rapti. “At last we meet,” he said.

“Hello,” she said, smiling, shaking her head, and then she gunned the car into reverse, out of the long, curving driveway.

The drive to Kai Tak airport took about fifteen minutes, exactly enough time for Min and Rapti to move from a polite, vague disagreement into a full-scale argument.

“So, your father is sending the refugees back tonight? Did he get an agreement that they won’t be maltreated back home?”

“Well, first of all,” Min said from the backseat, “my father does not want to send them back. You’ll see when we get there. He will be opposing the action, at the expense of his own job.”

“Really?” Rapti said. “I find that hard to believe. Considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering his past record with the refugees.”

“Are you referring to his fight for reforms within the camps?”

“I’m referring to the fact that he proposed a policy to
fine
them for having children inside the camps. Some of them have lived there for years. It’s very cruel.”

I looked at Min. “It happened while we were in the States,” he said, and then he turned to Rapti and said, “All he meant was that having children during these crisis months would place a strain on the community.”

“Strain on the community—that’s a ridiculous argument. Then nobody in the world should have children. I think asking people not to have children is just another form of genocide.”

After a moment of silence Rapti looked at me and shrugged.
Sorry,
she mouthed. I looked back at Min, who made his eyes as big as possible and then shook his head in amazement.

When we arrived at the airport, the Vietnamese were in the process of boarding the plane. We got as close as we could and stood on a little grassy patch, which I thought was sadly reminiscent of a meadow, at the edge of the runway. We stared through the barbed wire. Albert in fact wasn’t protesting. He was standing at the foot of the plane’s staircase, bowing to each person who stepped onto the stairs.

The time for protest was past, apparently, and now he could only apologize to each of them, even the smallest children. Some of the people shouted at him, a few spit, and a couple even lunged for him. I saw one refugee bow back, though, and the two men, head to head, looked like foreign dignitaries caught in a dreadful, unlikely situation. I remembered that Albert had said to me once that a person must bow even if he doesn’t want to. He must bow at everything, and the more he doesn’t want to bow, the more he must. He recalled a phrase that went, “The forehead should be rough with bowing.”

The air was heavy and humid, with an odor of overripe flowers. Overhead two helicopters hovered, churning the air, lifting my outer clothes an inch off my body. A dark rain started to fall.

Finally a break in the line occurred as a mother knelt to talk to her child, who was hysterical. Albert turned and saw us. His face was streaming with tears. He smiled though, and bowed to us. Min bowed back, and then I bowed, and then Rapti herself bowed to him. She had a stern look on her face, and I could tell that she did not approve of this but that she recognized the complexity of Albert’s situation.

If I had been able, like Min’s grandmother, to read the gestures of women, to discern their entire nature and future in one movement of a head or hand, I would have seen, as Rapti bowed, the present picture open for one moment to reveal the future—a warm, gently decorated apartment in a skyscraper high above a city that belongs again to the Chinese, who have carried it into the twenty-first century by transforming it into an even higher and wealthier and stranger city. On the crowded streets below, the Vietnamese, once held in the camps, have penetrated the bloodstream of the city, so that they are the ones deciding which new refugees to accept and which to reject.

And asleep, sprawled like a starfish on the floor of the apartment, is a small boy with a boxy, bold, contented face, his features drawn from such a wide circle of Asia that one can almost see the rays extending from him to all his origins—from the Philippines to the edges of Russia and Inner Mongolia, across the Tibetan plateau, into the foothills of the Himalayas, touching even the upper lip of India.

But for now none of that was revealed. In fact, as the three of us stood in the perfumey rain of Asia, watching Albert’s desperate, endless bowing and what must have been the unbearable desire and longing of the refugees, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the balance of the world—two-thirds contentment, one-third desire—could ever be restored.

World Party

ONE

It was always this moment in the fall semester, toward the end, the days shorter and darker, the seedpods and leaves broken and beautifully spent across our campus, that I brought out my lecture on Ovid. You don’t have to do much with Ovid—just begin to read and every person in the room gets spoken to about the deepest matters in their life.
My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms: The gods, who made the changes, will help me—or so I hope—with a poem that runs from the world’s beginning to our own days.

My period was Roman Antiquity, and this class was a survey course, so we had already run through Cleopatra, Caesar, and Virgil, now to Ovid. I usually ended with Jesus, when time itself cleaved in two, and the soul was united with God, infinity making its way into our battered little sphere of finity.

This was a late morning class, so even as I lectured, I was going over the afternoon in my mind: meet with Terrance in the faculty lounge, walk with him to committee meeting, and then get to World Party by five. World Party was a little banquet my son’s school put on for the students. It was a Quaker alternative to Halloween; all the children dressed up as characters from history or books or their own imagination, while the parents laid out food before them in a great banquet, the theme being that everyone, every last person, is invited to the banquet. My son, Teddy, was seven, so this would be our third World Party. I looked forward to it every year, despite the inevitable run-in with my ex-husband and his new family.

World Party always brought to mind a sermon I’d heard long ago, in Riverside Church in New York City. I was in my twenties at the time and the preacher kept repeating these words, for possibly two or three full minutes—
You don’t think you’re invited to the banquet? Well, you are. You don’t think you’re invited to the banquet? It couldn’t be you. Well, you are.

Partway through my lecture, I heard some shouting and anxious merrymaking outside, but it didn’t occur to me that it was a serious crowd gathering, despite the jangly, exciting energy to it. In the early part of the century, when this university was being built, some intelligent and benevolent architect or planner had put the history building right on the quad, a vast, beautiful, ever-changing landscape that would be the home of the many protests down through the years. During the sixties this classroom was a theater overlooking an endless stream of protests, mostly against the war. And now, in the fall of 1981, there seemed to be a resurgence of protest activity—against sexism, against apartheid, against a cement plant being built on the edge of campus, against every single tree that was taken down to clear way for more buildings, and against various faculty members for their fascism or their communism or their support for Third-World dictators.

My favorite agitators were the streakers, who always looked so dramatic and vulnerable and innocent to me. They were always tall skinny men, their nakedness not sexual at all, but more like a great, comical symbol of humanity. Their whole message was wrapped up in the image, Christ-like, absurd.

Today the weather was supporting the unease; it was dark for daytime, and the wind was shifting about. Also, the campus was alive with a general unrest in those days, as the university was considering suspending the activity of one of the most visible protest groups on campus. The group went by the name Harvest. Their faculty advisor was a man named Stewart Applebaum. In fact, my meeting later today was an emergency meeting to discuss what to do with Stewart Applebaum and his band of protestors, whom I admired, actually, but also I understood there was something frightening about the cult aspect of the group, their devotion to each other, their extremism, their seeming almost dionysian happiness when they gathered. Stewart Applebaum was an economics professor, so a lot of the group’s time seemed to be taken up probing the university’s investments, looking for scurrilous, immoral places the university was making money. They had built shanties in the quad when it was discovered the university was still supporting apartheid financially; they chained themselves to trees that had been tagged for destruction to make way for a new administration building. And they held endless, vigilant demonstrations against a cement plant that was to be built on the edge of campus and would pollute the campus pretty much permanently.

I had always considered them a force for good on campus, a reasonable way for students to learn the art of dissent, and a sort of exciting, ever-present challenge to the status quo, which I thought was healthy. But then lately, their protests had taken on a sort of worrisome cast. It had been discovered that three of the young men were proposing a hunger strike set to start two days hence, and this had seized all the university administrators, and everybody actually, with a kind of terror.

TWO

After class, I swung by our main office to pick up a big stack of applications for our graduate program. The students applying each had to write an essay on a moment in history that interested them. Our graduate program was very popular on account of two professors mostly. There was Jonathan Rudd, who was writing a history of the whole world told through one historical figure from each half-century. The books were written as a series, and he had completed nearly twelve of them. Some historians scoffed at them a little, but they were best sellers, and actually I found them really entertaining. Our other best seller was Sylvia Nixon, who had written one very beautiful, slightly annoying book—a memoir essentially—that somehow interposed the events of her life with some of the greatest events of the twentieth century. You couldn’t even call her a historian, really. She used history in the most chilling way possible, as a metaphor for events in her own life.

And then I headed, as every day, back to our shabby little coffee-Xerox room to find my friend Liv, just returned from her Italy 1912 class. Liv’s area was Italian Fascism, heavy emphasis on Mussolini, who was cut from the same cloth as Liv’s tyrannical father. Liv had emerged from a terrible childhood and early marriage to be always the sanest, most stable, most cheerful person in any room. Every day after teaching we retired here, to this little notch in the wall, which we just called “small room.” Our faculty mailboxes were in here, so every now and then one of the men in our department would duck in, chat a bit, and retrieve his mail, but they knew the room was ours. One had even complained about it, said he didn’t appreciate having to get his mail out of the “ladies room” every day.

Liv was standing at the narrow window. We were on the third floor, and our view faced away from campus: You could spot, in the far distance, a patch of something we knew to be the ocean. It was a like a little painting—a miniature line of pine trees, a procession to the sea. Today some dark blue and gray clouds were roiling around, carrying something gorgeous and frightening in from the ocean. Liv was dressed in an old corduroy Laura Ashley dress, which looked like it would be worn by the school teacher in
Little House on the Prairie.
She was staring outside, pensively. “A storm is blowing from Paradise,” she said, quoting Walter Benjamin.

I saw she had an application in her hand; she’d already begun reading. “How are they?” I asked.

“They’re good, they’re fine. Though the one I’m reading right now is about Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which isn’t quite in the past yet. It’s hard to classify it historically already.”

“We should have a department called the Present,” I said.

“The Department of the Present,” Liv said. “It would be about what one did last night, this morning, and what one will do tonight,” Liv said.

“They would all major in it,” I said, as Terrance appeared in the doorway.

“Oh we’re all having lunch?” Liv said. Terrance had originally been her friend; he was in the Biology Department and had consulted with her while working on his book, which had just been published and was a completely riveting history of various plagues—viral and bacterial—that had flourished on earth in the bodies of men, women, and children from approximately 200,000
BC
until now, October of 1981. It was called
Plagues and People
and seemed to have no preference for the people over the plagues. In fact, at times in the narrative he seemed to be meditating quite deeply on the plight of this or that virus, as it desperately tried to survive on the human body, having to feed off it, but also having to tread carefully so as not to kill its fragile host.

Then last September Terrance and I had been put on a committee together—the Faculty Hearings Committee—so he and I had spent many Friday afternoons cloistered in a little room high atop the campus, pondering various faculty misdeeds.

“We can’t have lunch,” I said to Liv. “Terrance and I have an emergency meeting for Stewart Applebaum.”

“That’s today?” she said.

“It’s today. It’s in an hour,” I said.

“Okay. Geesh,” she said. “I wish I could come along. Good luck. It’s getting so scary.”

“I hope we find that he’s innocent and that the whole thing is just getting away from him.”

“I don’t think you’ll find that,” Liv said. “I think you’ll find that he’s the devil. Like, the real devil. Using young people’s passions against them, and for his own purposes.”

“What are the chances that the actual devil is on our faculty?” Terrance seemed thrilled at the thought.

“I think it’s likely,” Liv said. “Justine has met him already, you know,” she said to Terrance, gesturing to me. “She found him attractive.”

“Ooooh,” Terrance said. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

“It’s a hearing,” I said, “I don’t think you’ll really
meet
him, exactly.”

“Well, we can still make eyes at him,” said Terrance.

I had met Stewart Applebaum about a month earlier, at a library benefit, and had been surprised by what a cheerful, relaxed person he was. I’d expected someone darkly muttering, or angry, or a blowhard of some sort. But he had been actually really charming and fun. And I was still clinging (pathetically) to a little thing he said to me, that we ought to have coffee one day together. I had even mentioned it to Liv, hoping she could help me scrutinize it for any romantic content.

“Couldn’t you tell by the way he said it?” she had asked.

“Not really. I mean, normally I would think yes, but it just seems so unlikely. He’s about ten years younger than me.”

“Some brave women overcome that.”

“You have to be really on top of your game.”

“Yes. You’ve got to keep it all together.”

What had struck me about that night was the sudden return of an old feeling, what Rilke called the “calling to vast things.” I had been so involved in the march of time—my marriage, Teddy’s birth, his troubles, my work, my divorce—that I’d forgotten this feeling entirely. I was stepping back inside the library from its big balcony, which is held by huge white pillars and whose view is the entire hissing, southern campus, with the deep turbulent ocean visible in the distance. Stewart Applebaum and I had just had a brief conversation, mostly about some work a colleague of mine was doing on the various economies of Central America, and we had already said goodbye, but then he said to me as I was walking away,
We should have coffee sometime soon.
I realized it wasn’t the most stunning suggestion any man has said to any woman, but it so genuinely surprised me that it was as if the feeling itself—of attraction or whatever—just appeared as a person appears. I was like a woman at a drawer, putting away her party dresses between tissue paper, and there he stood in the doorway—not Stewart Applebaum, but this feeling—gentlemanly, feral, breathtaking, peaceful, something very close to life itself, asking me for one more dance down in the meadow.

THREE

The meeting was across campus. Since the day was so blustery, there was a strange, exciting, hurricaney feel to it, and as we stepped into the quad, a wind was whipping around some tiny raindrops. In one corner some students were setting up a makeshift stage and there was a disorganized crowd gathering. Their signs were face down on the ground to prevent the rain from wrecking them, so we couldn’t read what they would be protesting. I suspected it was Stewart Applebaum’s group but wasn’t sure until I heard a young man shout out as he walked under the clocktower, “While in life,” and a couple guys working on the sound stage stood up and called back, “To fight for life.” These were references to a Stephen Spender poem that the group used as a call and response. It was a beautiful poem—“I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great,” which was written in 1942.

“So it’s them,” I said to Terrance.

“Yes. I guess they may be protesting the hearing itself.”

“Yes.”

Early in the semester, our chancellor, who was quite sick with a rare form of late-stage leukemia but still working, suggested in a way I found plaintive and sweet, especially from a man so close to death, that perhaps the students should use these “gatherings” not as a time to protest but rather to celebrate what they appreciated about their country and their university, and this had enraged the students and sent them spiraling into the quad with signs aloft protesting the chancellor himself.