The Wangs vs. the World(111)
“Okay, but if you ever want to discuss, we can. Even if I am your sister.”
“Okay.”
Saina kissed his shoulder and matched her breathing to his as he closed his eyes and slowly dropped off to sleep.
Three hours later, Saina was still up. It must be almost dawn now, but her circadian clock was out of sync and the weird metallic tang that permeated the waiting room was difficult to ignore. She’d read Grayson’s email over and over again until the words had lost their meaning; her ex-fiancé and her now ex-boyfriend chased each other around and around in her head.
She got up slowly, trying not to wake anyone up. An old woman slept to her left, head tucked into her neck, her forehead remarkably unlined under a yellowish white bob. Saina had seen her come in close to three a.m., balancing a set of bamboo baskets topped with a pointed lid. Saina knew that there were steamed buns in there. She could smell their sweet yeastiness and the distinct wood-pulp whiff of the heated baskets. The thought of offering a few yuan for one was tempting, but these must have been made especially for a patient, someone very dear to this granny, who was willing to forgo a night of sleep and possibly a day’s wages to make a long journey.
Maybe her father was up, too, somewhere in this hospital. She had gotten nowhere with the nurse on duty, who refused to even look up a patient outside of visiting hours. Saina had tried to circumvent her by calling the number her father had dictated, but it rang right at the desk, and the nurse had picked it up triumphantly, saying in English, “Hey-lo!” Now the woman was finally facing away, engrossed in a Korean drama on the tiny block of a television that sat at her station.
Regrets were the easiest things to remember. She wished that she had never told Leo that Grayson always tried to make her be the big spoon. It was true, but it felt like a terrible thing to say about another man. Her former fiancé had always wanted to be the one who was hugged and protected. “We burn up the world together.” That was true, too. At their best, they were incandescent. Electrified by each other. In a room filled with friends and former lovers and people they should probably know, no one else had ever mattered but her and him.
Keeping an eye on the nurse’s back, Saina opened a door with another KEEP OUT sign and slipped into a long hallway. She’d kept vigil in a hospital once before, for a daredevil friend who’d been in a drunken motorcycle accident in Manhattan, but that time dozens of nurses had stalked the corridors, following patients in wheelchairs with IVs on rollers. It was different here, an hour outside of Beijing. Almost no staff. A crowd of waiting visitors. As Chinese as she felt in Helios or even Manhattan, the hospital in China was a foreign land. Her flats squeaked on the cheap linoleum floors, and she held her breath as something rattled in the distance. When nothing appeared around the corner, she let her breath out slowly. Yoga breath. Phew. Safe.
At the first set of double doors, Saina paused and looked inside the window. What the hell? The fluorescent lights blazed, and the patients lay in long, pathetic rows, as if they were in an army ward. Each one seemed to have a leg slung up on a pulley or a bandaged stump resting over their blanket. It was horrifying. Was her father in one of these wards? Alone in a crowd of Chinese people? He’d said only that he’d gotten into a fight and that they were both in the hospital. Were his injuries worse than she thought? She looked at the men—and they were all men—in the narrow room, relieved when she couldn’t find her father’s face.
They really did look like casualties. Was China fighting some clandestine war in its hinterlands? A true conflict in Tibet? Or another suppression of artists and scholars?
Saina knew that her grandparents had fled the Japanese. There were stories of narrow escapes, of running down a road in soft-soled shoes, a Japanese fighter plane strafing the ground. Somehow, Saina had always pictured it in hazy, romantic tones, as if a pair of torn stockings had been the only casualty. And then one day she’d been online, searching for photos for her Look/Look project, feeling slightly ill as she scanned groupings of refugees for a pretty face. She’d started out on the familiar news sites—the New York Times, Newsweek, the BBC. One click had led to another, and gradually she found herself moving through sites full of conspiracy theory and invective, with the photos themselves getting more and more graphic, whole slide shows preceded by flashing titles: THE ISH THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE! or NSFW GRAPHIC.
Before that, it had never occurred to Saina that the photos of war she saw in the paper, the long rows of patients with bandaged stumps like the men before her, the dead bodies in ditches, that those were still censored for the coddled public who would—wouldn’t they?—rise up and demand peace forever if they saw what war really looked like. If they had seen photographs like the ones that crowded into her browser, image after image of men turned into carcasses, butchers’ piles of meat and organs made grotesque by a human hand or head, they could never arm their children and send them overseas to fight other people’s children.
Her grandparents’ escape could not have been some daring, madcap jaunt. The gunfire, in her childhood imagination, had always pinged ineffectually on either side of the golden path, the stupid Japanese never coming close to her daring grandparents. But, of course, that couldn’t be true. It must have hit people, destroyed them, burst open their bodies, and left them twisted and wrecked all over the road. Her grandmother, in her soft-soled shoes, must have run past children with their limbs blown in half, their bloody bones cracked so that the marrow was exposed like joints of lamb, their small bodies sniffed at by mad-eyed dogs.