“A reversal of fortune,” Hel said.
I don’t want to talk about me. I want to tell you about a man named Jin Fan-Wen.
It’s easier to think of him as two men who lived different lives. Two people: Dr. Jin and Mr. Jin. Both are dead. As a specialist in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I knew Dr. Jin by reputation. Mr. Jin, who lived and died in this world, is a person with whom I’ve become acquainted only recently. But he is the one I want to tell you about. About his fate, as it unfolded here.
Nineteen hundred and nine is the generally accepted year now, the year of the first divergences. Jin Fan-Wen was born safely just Before, in 1908, to a middle-class family in the Chinese city of Xiangshan on the western bank of the Pearl River. His well-educated parents—a laboratory technician and a shorthand instructor at a secretarial school—expected their only son to excel. Young Fan-Wen received high marks, showing special promise in the sciences. A sober-natured child, he was known to spend his leisure time not in games or sport but with a pencil and pad. I’ve had the opportunity to examine a few of his schoolboy drawings—made in 1918 and 1919 and saved by a sentimental mother—intricate thatches of abstract line. (No doubt his counterpart also liked to draw, in the other world. No doubt he tended toward variations of the same themes.) I find the sketches mesmerizingly creative, though I am not one to judge their artistic merit.
But by any standard, Fan-Wen was bright and obedient. He studied his lessons. All who knew him felt secure in predicting for him a brilliant career.
The fortunes of the boy who would one day become Mr. Jin changed drastically in the spring of his eighteenth year. Ineffable forces delayed the split between Communists and Nationalists, and the White Famine that ravaged my China never emerged; thus, in 1926, the political and social situation in his country remained sufficiently stable for young Jin Fan-Wen’s parents to decide to send him to the newly founded National Central University, rather than shipping him abroad to be educated as they would do in my own world. In the city of Nanking, where he was to sit the examination, the streetcar in which young Fan-Wen traveled collided with a stuffed-bun cart, which had become stuck on the tracks while the vendor who owned it attempted to push it to a better spot in the shade of the buildings on the avenue. Fan-Wen and other uninjured parties helped to pull the dead and dying from the wrecked car. By the time he reached the university, arriving on foot with a torn shirt and blood beneath his fingernails, the examinations were already underway. His excuses were not accepted.
My informant in all these particulars is Mr. Jin’s adult daughter, Jin Bingbing, who heard the story of this fateful day many times at her father’s knee. Why would such an intimate encounter with others’ mortality put a young man with talent and inclination off medicine as a course of study? Why was Jin Fan-Wen not able to take the examinations on another day or the following year? Jin Bingbing, with whom I communicate by email through a translator, does not seem able to answer these questions. When I heard his story, I wondered if perhaps he stopped to help those injured streetcar passengers precisely because he wished to escape the fate that, his whole life long, seemed to have been prearranged for him.
Catastrophe. The sweep of a butterfly’s wing. I wonder what I would have done if it hadn’t been for that booby-trapped house in San Antonio my unit was assigned to patrol. There are things a man is expected to do with his hands. After the incisions healed and they finally released me from the hospital, I would get drunk. Little blue bottles. It was a test of my dexterity, getting them open. Holding the bottle still between my knees and gripping with one re-formed arm and then the other, and then the reward. I would feel the liquor burn down my esophagus. Drunk was the only state in which I felt able to attempt the exercises set for me by my therapists. Drawing lines, as the young Fan-Wen had once done, only in my case, I pinned the pencil between two extremities that had, until the procedure, been the bones of my forearm. The alcohol that fogged my brain estranged me from the grief, the horror that I normally felt until, at last, all I saw was a problem to solve.
What can I do with these broken tools? Asking this question turned me into a scientist.
But I told you that I didn’t want to talk about myself. You have tricked me!
Mr. Jin would never be a doctor. He did not attend university, not in Nanking (soon to be renamed Nanjing) or anywhere else. Instead, he took up the trade of mending appliances, apprenticing in the workroom of a small repair shop in the suburbs built up in the alluvial plains around Xiangshan, soon to become re-Romanized as Zhongshan. When the appliance shop became collectivized, he hung on. Though he came from an undesirable class background, he kept his head down and survived the Cultural Revolution. All day, he wired broken lamps and rewelded hot plates that no longer heated. Sometimes, when the case was hopeless, he advised customers where they might buy a replacement. He married a rather quarrelsome woman and when she died young, of an ovarian cancer, he got married again—more felicitously—to Jin Bingbing’s mother. He was an active parent; Ms. Jin remembers him helping her with calligraphy in their one-room apartment.
And at night, he diagrammed elaborate circuits. The switches and coils, the resistors and capacitors: all drawn confidently in ink. Mr. Jin died as a very old man. He was weak and bald as a baby and utterly without material or intellectual legacy, unsung and unrecognized. But he died at home. His granddaughter cried at his bedside.
Fated by identical genes, Dr. Jin also survived to an advanced age. Just a decade after finishing his studies, he grew famous for his pioneering study of lipoprotein levels among the Chinese immigrant population in Oceania and the correlation of these levels with heart disease. He was among the first to emphasize the role of diet in promoting cardiovascular health. As an epidemiologist, he could take indirect credit for saving thousands of lives. He passed from life on a modern sofa of Indonesian design in an elegant Sydney penthouse. Many admired him; he possessed honorary degrees from institutions all over the world. Still, Dr. Jin was a lifelong bachelor. It would be days before the cleaning lady discovered the body.
There could be a third world where this man was an engineer. A fourth where he became an art teacher. The possibilities stretch into eternity, for all of us. It is dizzying.
I used the word fate just now. I may have said it more than once. We humans tend to see whatever befalls us as our fate. We perceive good things and bad things alike as happening just the way they are meant to. To teach us lessons, maybe. To make us into the women and men we ought to become. If one lives to be old—as I have—it’s terrifying to imagine the infinite slew of choices made over the course of a lifetime. Different events. Different luck.
A politician makes a speech. A virus fails to mutate. A homemade bomb goes off. A traffic accident happens in China. Who is to say what constitutes our happiness? How can we predict? I would not take my hands back now, though I certainly would have at any time in the decade after I lost them.
So I can understand this: whether her passage through Dr. Mornay’s Gate was purposeful or accidental, Teresa Klay made the best of things. She got used to secrecy and to her own singularity. Then when the life she’d pulled together was challenged, she reacted violently, trying to erase all evidence of the world she came from. Ree viewed the possibility of renewed interest in the world that UDPs like herself came from, the potential for sustained inquiry into the nature of the divergence, as threats.