The middle-aged man and Xiao Bi walked up to the front desk, where they spoke briefly to the receptionist before being led by an elegant woman to seats in a VIP area to the left of the lobby. They sat in brick red high-backed chairs behind a table with a vase of mauve roses. The man sneezed, and nearly made me jump out of my chair. It was a strange and distinctive sneeze, loud as an exploding detonator that triggered a memory. Could that be him?
Our doctors initiate detailed conversations with the pregnant woman and their family regarding the state of the woman’s health, the state of the foetus, the mother’s nutritional and exercise routines, and other concerns.
I desperately wanted to share my discovery with Little Lion, but she was too focused on the brochures, muttering as she read. How can they call this a hospital? Who can afford to stay in a place like this… With her back to Xiao Bi, she hadn’t noticed their arrival.
Apparently concerned that they were too conspicuous, the man stood up, took Xiao Bi by the hand, and walked over to the coffee shop at the rear of the entry hall, separated by large pots of tortoise-shell bamboo, with their jade green leaves, and a potted banyan tree whose leafy branches nearly touched the ceiling. The wall behind a fireplace was papered in a red brick design. The coffee shop was equipped with a bar with a rack filled with brand name liquor. A young man in a black bowtie was brewing gourmet coffee whose fragrance blended with the floral perfume to produce a sense of nurturing.
The hospital is also equipped with a rehearsal room for women late in their pregnancy. Delivery options are discussed with doctors and nurses, based upon the pregnant woman’s particular situation, and a mother-to-be classroom, all structured to enhance communications between hospital staff and patients, who are given unlimited opportunities to make their needs, concerns, and questions known.
He sat there with a cup of coffee, talking intimately with Xiao Bi. Yes, indeed, that’s who it was. A person can change the way he talks, but not the way he sneezes. A person can turn single-fold eyelids into double folds, but the greatest plastic surgeon alive cannot change the look in a man’s eyes. He was talking easily and laughing no more than twenty metres from me, totally unaware that a childhood friend was watching him. And as I watched, the wicked and merciless Xiao Xiachun, no longer with single-fold eyelids, separated himself from the body of the distinguished man.
It’s hopeless! Little Lion said dejectedly as she tossed the brochure onto the table and leaned back. US-trained doctors, French-trained graduates, medical college professors… top medical group in the country… the only way they’d let me in here would be to clean the toilets…
We were from the same hometown, we lived in Beijing at the same time, and yet I hadn’t seen him even once. I recalled how his father had paraded up and down the streets shouting, My son has been given a job at the State Council! after graduating from college. He spent several years in an office there before being taken on as the secretary to a bureau chief, and from there he took a post as deputy Party secretary somewhere. Then he left public office and became a real estate mogul worth billions…
The elegant woman who had greeted us located the two of them and led them out back somewhere. I shut the brochure I was reading. The back cover showed the hands of a doctor and a pregnant woman, all resting on her swollen belly. The text at the top read: Mothers-to-be and their children are family to us. We provide the best treatment found anywhere. You will be able to soak up our atmosphere of sweetness and experience the blessing of total care and attention.
In a complete funk as we left the hospital, Little Lion used every hackneyed political expression she could think of to excoriate these modern developments. I was too occupied with my own thoughts to pay attention to her. But her monotonous chatter started to bother me. All right, madam, enough sour grapes!
Rather than get angry with me, she just coughed up a bitter laugh and said, All a rustic doctor like me is good for is raising bullfrogs at Yuan Sai’s farm.
We came back here to live in retirement, I said, not look for work.
I have to find something to do, she said. Maybe I can work as a live-in wet nurse.
Enough, I said. Say, guess who I just saw?
Who?
Xiao Xiachun. He changed his appearance, but I recognised him.
Impossible, she said. What would a rich man like him be doing back here? You must have mistaken somebody else for him.
If it had been my eyes, possibly, but not my ears. No one on earth sneezes like him. Then there were the look in his eyes and that laugh. He couldn’t change those.
Maybe he’s come back for another big investment, Little Lion said. I hear we’re going to fall under Qingdao administration before long. When that happens, the price of land and houses will shoot up.
Now, guess who he was with?
How am I supposed to guess that, Little Lion replied.
Xiao Bi.
Who?
Xiao Bi, the girl at the bullfrog farm.
I see, she said. I knew she was a slut the minute I laid eyes on her. There’s something unclean about her relationship with your cousin and Yuan Sai.
6
Little Lion found the bullfrog farm repugnant, and had little good to say about Yuan Sai and my cousin. But the day after we visited the Sino-American Jiabao Women and Children’s Hospital, out of the blue she said: Xiaopao, I’m going to work at the bullfrog farm.
That was a shock. Her large face beamed with a smile.
Really. I’m not joking, she said soberly, the smile gone.
Those critters, I’ve been trying to drive the stubborn image of bullfrogs out of my head — after watching Gugu’s TV documentary I think I developed a phobia of all frogs — and now you say you want to raise those critters?
There’s no reason to be afraid of frogs, you know, since we have the same ancestors. Tadpoles and human sperm look about the same, and there isn’t much difference between frog and human eggs. And there’s more — have you seen human foetus specimens in the first three months, how they have a long tail? They’re just like frogs in their metamorphic stage.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
Why does the word for frogs — wa — sound exactly like the word for babies — wa? This was a prepared speech. Why is the first sound a newborn baby makes an almost exact replica of a frog’s croak? How come so many of the clay dolls made in Northeast Gaomi Township are holding frogs in their arms? And why is the ancestor of humans called Nü wa? Like the ‘wa’ for frog. Doesn’t that prove that our earliest ancestor was a frog, and that we have evolved from her? The theory that men evolved from apes is wrong…
As she went on and on I began to detect a conversational style used by Yuan Sai and my cousin, and I knew that she’d fallen under the spell of those two smooth talkers.
Okay, I said, if you’re bored at home with nothing to do, you can give it a try. But, I added, trying to sound prophetic, I’m betting you’ll pack it in within a week.
7
Sensei, even though I said I opposed Little Lion’s plan to work at the bullfrog farm, deep down I was pleased. I am by nature someone who treasures his time alone; I like to go for solitary walks, when I can reflect on the past. And if there’s nothing in the past that captures my fancy, I let my thoughts go where they will. Taking walks with Little Lion is something I need to do, and no matter how unpleasant it is to carry out such responsibilities, it’s important to pretend I’m happy and excited to be doing them. Now things have taken a positive turn, since she leaves the house early in the morning to work at the bullfrog farm, getting there on a motorised bicycle she said my cousin had bought for her. I watch through the window as she primly motors down the riverside road, silently and effortlessly on the new ride. Once her figure disappears, I hurry down the stairs