The Middle Kingdom Read Online Free

I’ll see you again.’
    I knew she was right: that for the rest of my life, she’d be with me wherever I went. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, and then we both ran out of words. As I wheeled my bike away from the steps, I turned and saw her watching, the breeze blowing her graying hair away from her face.

II
ENTERING CHINA
SEPTEMBER 1986
    P ATIENT:
Doctor, I’ve come to you because I think I have a strange disease.
    D OCTOR:
What is it?
    P ATIENT:
I have been afraid of noise and strong light for two years. When I’m exposed to these, I feel tense and restless.
    D OCTOR:
Do you have other symptoms?
    P ATIENT:
Yes. At times I suffer from palpitations and shortness of breath. I sleep poorly and am troubled almost nightly by frightening dreams.
    D OCTOR:
What sort of dreams do you have?
    P ATIENT:
They are different. For instance, once I dreamed that I fell down from a precipice. On another occasion I was chased by a wolf, and in other dreams I have lost my way in a desert.

    â€”adapted from
A Dialogue in the Hospitals

T HE F RAGRANT H ILLS
    We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results.
    â€”Mao
    W HEN I WAS nine I had scarlatina, which was something like being boiled alive. A huge burning fever. Scalded skin. And a delirium so deep that, always after that, I believed in the possibility of another world.
    My mother packed me in ice every few hours to knock my fever down, and afterward she never tired of recounting her trials. In a room full of friends and relatives she would draw me to her, stroke my head, and describe my rigid and trembling form, my burned lips and my rolled-back eyes. She’d tell how she had labored over me then, cooling, stroking, soothing; for years she drew on that capital, reproaching me each time I failed her with tales of her sleepless nights.
    Maybe she stayed awake all those nights. Maybe she kept me alive. That doesn’t sound like her, but maybe it’s true – all I know of those lost days is what she told me. All that remains of my own from then is a memory of the voice that came to visit my head.
    Eat your peas
, the voice said at first. My mother, inside my skull.
    Don’t put your elbows on the table.
    Sit up straight. Hold your stomach in. Don’t bite your fingernails.
    I had caught the fever from a girl named Zillah, who lived in the projects by the riverside and who had the habit of making whole worlds out of pebbles and feathers and pinecones and rice. She laid these out on the sand at the base of the gravel pit, where we were strictly forbidden to play, and once she’d finished we peopled the streets and spaces with the beings we saw in our heads. Stones that grew out of the earth like trees. Trees that sang like birds. Stars that wept and talking dogs and wheat that acted with one mind, moving like an army. I was forbidden to play with Zillah, but she drew me like fire and when she got sick I followed her right in.
    She died. I lived. And on the night she died, the voice that had nagged me throughout my fever – low and trivial, admonitory, hardly a voice at all – took a sharp turn and started bringing me Zillah’s life instead. Zillah’s voice, all that Zillah had dreamed and thought unreeling inside my head; Zillah’s family, Zillah’s home, Zillah’s plans for our lives. She gave me a glimpse, when I was too young to understand it, of what it was truly like to inhabit someone else’s skin. And then she left.
    I lost Zillah’s voice as soon as my fever broke, and I didn’t think about it for years – not until the fall of 1986, when I was on the last leg of a long journey from Massachusetts to China. I’d cried from Boston to Chicago: I was afraid of planes, I hated to fly. From Chicago to Seattle I’d slept. Some hours out