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"You are?" she asked Nan. "No wonder you look so pale. But don't worry. You'll be all right soon. It's just the process of getting readjusted. You'll feel normal within a month."
Nan thought of telling her that he'd be going back to the States the next week, but he refrained. He didn't feel like talking much and just enjoyed listening to them. The waitress came again and put a teacup before Sirong. Sirong ordered a wonton soup.
When the panfried noodles, the wontons, and the shredded beef tendons arrived, Sirong said to Nan, "I must confess I miss America, a lot."
"What do you miss most?"
" Things like big apples, big salmon, and big lobster," she said in all sincerity. "Also, I'm a chocoholic and miss all kinds of chocolates they have there."
Nan laughed and told her, "We serve salmon in our restaurant every day. You should come and visit us."
"I'd love to. Mmmm, I still remember the lobster and shrimp we had at a crab shack in Plymouth, near the Mayflower. You see, here fish are skimpy and fruit puny. We Chinese eat too much and have used up our land."
Da
Nan nodded. "I saw some big fat kids this morning, like in the States."
"Not just children who overeat, grown-ups too," said Sirong. " Da
Indeed, Da
"In fact," said Da
"All right, I'll come."
Sirong had to return to work before one-thirty and left the moment she was done with her wontons. The two friends strolled back, Da
While they walked, they chatted about people they both knew. Da
Exhausted and groggy, Nan slept for the rest of the afternoon in the guest room. He snored loudly, which fascinated the girl in the next room, who had never met anyone who made such thunderous noise in his sleep. On her dad's instructions, she lowered the volume of the TV, yet when Nan 's snores penetrated the wall, interfering with the voice of the math teacher on the screen, she turned it up again. But whenever she did this, her father would come out of his study and order her to keep it down. Besides not wanting to wake Nan, he couldn't think clearly with the TV blasting.
8
TOWARD EVENING, a midnight blue Audi with tinted windows came to pick Da
The chauffeur tooted the horn, urging a cyclist to make way for their car, which bucked again and again as if about to crush the bicycle, but its rider simply didn't respond. Not until the man rounded a corner could their car resume a normal speed. Dangling from the rearview mirror was a tiny oval portrait of Chairman Mao with a golden tassel. Nan wondered if that was some sort of amulet.
As they were approaching a crossroads, the light turned red, but their car didn't stop. The chauffeur signaled and drove left, ignoring the honking of other vehicles. A green motorcycle puttered up behind them, and a policeman in the side car shouted through a bullhorn, "Pull over to the side!"
"Fucking cops!" cursed the driver without moving his head. He clicked on the blinker, slowing down, and brought the car to a stop.
" Are they going to give you a ticket?" Nan asked him.
"Oh well, I've never paid a fine."
Nan turned around and saw the two policemen hop off the motorcycle and stride up to their car. But as they were approaching, one of them pointed at the rear of the Audi, then they both veered off to a newsstand as if to deal with a more urgent incident over there first. Nan was bewildered.
The chauffeur said in an undertone, "Bastards, they're not that stupid." He pulled away smoothly.
" Why did they change their minds?" Nan asked.
"This is an army vehicle," explained Da
"So army vehicles don't have to follow the traffic rules?" asked Nan.
The chauffeur said, "They can give me as many tickets as they like, but there's no way they can collect the fines."
Da
Nan said, "Zis is crazy, still like two decades ago." "Yes, things are basically the same."
They pulled into the yard of a medium-size hotel, and the chauffeur told them that he would come around nine-thirty to pick them up. Through a moon gate Da
"Welcome!" a roly-poly man cried at them. Obviously the host, he was wearing a herringbone suit and shiny oxfords. He showed them to a table in a corner where five men were already seated. At the sight of Da
With pride he introduced Nan to them as his American friend.
They were all pleased to see Nan. On the table were two saucers containing condensed milk and a bamboo basket holding tiny steamed buns, both serving as an appetizer. They went on gossiping about some recent events in Beijing's literary circles: the nominations for this year's major prizes and what offices were involved; which one of the pretty young women writers had outsold the others; the two poets who had just been offered a trip to Paris the next spring; an editor who had been fired last week for publishing a book offensive to the authorities, which had changed the policy, punishing editors in place of authors; how there was going to be a conference on a first novel by a young man whose father was a high-ranking official in the State Council. Nan knew nothing about their world and just listened.