From Chapter 3

We were caught in a storm.

"I'm going to burn my clothes if they get wet. Do you know how polluted the rain is?" Laurie turned around and whined out to me, grinning through tight jaws.

We had stayed at the Jinjiang shopping arcade too long. Now we crept down Huai Hai Road on our bicycles, in axle-to-axle traffic, as a smoky twilight began to descend over the sky. A bicyclist veered to the right and miles behind him, patterns mutated. Chaos and harmony all at once. I was happiest in the thick of it. I wasn't taking many pictures yet; I wanted to be sure I wasn't shooting deceptions.

My new red Phoenix had begun to squeak, already. It was supposed to be the best brand in China, and after less than three weeks it needed oiling. The rain became heavier.

"This is dis-gust-ing," said Laurie. She turned away and pedaled determinedly, her head sinking behind her squared shoulders. Her arms were bare and it was getting colder.

Many of the bicyclists hauled hand-rigged contraptions alongside their back wheels. Some were filled with metal machine parts. Others carried flocks of live chickens with white feathers that had turned gray. Radios blared tinny music, truck horns wheezed, bicycle bells trilled. Young boys wore tee shirts with pictures of almost-super human warrior characters out of movie studios in Hollywood or Hong Kong. Young women cycling home from work wore knee-high hose, and cheap, battered high-heels in pastel colors.

Shanghai was a fetid place where people once died of overcrowding, where students and writers once brewed the fervor of revolt in smoky coffeehouses. You could feel ancient toil in the air, you could imagine the kind of men who'd ruled and been conquered in the grime on the old, cracked French colonial houses with bay windows almost hidden under laundry that hung from poles beneath the eaves. But Shanghai was a place where you could never trust the sights before you, unlike Hong Kong, where no amount of greed and privilege seemed sheltered from sight. Shanghai was once paneled interiors heavy with cigar smoke and the swirl of sherry, champagne, beef and bacon, seared ham, puddings, pastries, oranges, figs, and port and claret on the palate. It was back alleys where people still washed their faces in sewer water, it was Confucian bluster and servility to authority. It was a revolution that was more of the same, mass submission to a false god, death to those who even thought of anarchy.

It was a name that means "above the sea" and even though the waterfront was on the Huangpo River, the sea was everything. Men had arrived by boat to play there with no mercy, building and making money, admiring the little dolls that were live women with bound minds and feet. Men bound the masses to hard labor in the revolution, then they said wear the cheap versions of Western fashion we produce. The young women of Shanghai now rode bicycles, hobbled over slippery cement, worked in jobs, all the time blistering their feet in those painful high-heels, Band-Aids poking out beneath. The boulevards in Shanghai had stores with dingy windows showing dummies in elaborate white bridal gowns, Western-style, with a thousand petticoats. Dummies waiting for the world to bring in consumerism, beckoning women to come in, become a bride and learn to want things, buy things and make your country better.

The bicyclists ahead of us were nearly at a standstill. A truck, painted flat turquoise, lumbered into my path, then crept up right beside me on my left. I found a narrow strip of space ahead of me and maneuvered away. Behind me, it wheezed like an asthmatic and weaved a little to the left, then lurched forward, back in my path, so close that I could feel its hot metal.

"Watch out...better move out of the way of that maniac...," Laurie warned me.

She was on my right, inching forward. I pedaled fast, till I was just ahead of the truck. But someone else crept up, almost touching handlebars with me. A boy hunched over, his head covered by a rain poncho. He stared at me and shouted, "Look out," in Mandarin. Then he jingled his rusty bicycle bell, pulled out full speed ahead, into a minuscule gap of space ahead of me. I slowed down to keep out of his way.

"Would you look at...." I started to say.

The truck lunged again. I heard a wheeze, then a screech. Metal against metal. It seemed to keep coming, out of control. I felt my wheels give way. The truck kept moving. I was hurling forward. My right elbow crashed against the street, right into a pothole, filled with filthy rainwater. My hands skidded, raw and stinging against cold tar. My bicycle entangled, back wheel on top of my throbbing right arm, my right foot sticking out of bent spokes on the front wheel. My right leg scraped against something. My skin burned, my limbs ached. Hitting farther down against hard ground, I strained to keep my head up, imagining it might crack like an eggshell. I could feel my whole body trembling. I might be about to die.

Above me, a circle of faces with dark slanted eyes stared down.

"Can you move your leg?" Laurie asked in a different voice, calm and not whiny. She was trying to grab me by the armpits.

I wiggled my right leg under my bicycle. It didn't hurt, except for the searing pain where my skin had been scraped and the throbbing of my elbow.

"Yeah," I said. I tried to breathe in. The air was thick, too hot, with a stench of tar. I peered at the crowd, scanning in vain for a hole to break through, free, unsurrounded. "Where's my bike?"

A wizened man with piercing eyes stepped forward and lifted the bike while someone else, a young man, pulled me out from under it and helped me sit up.

The young man touched my elbow very gently. "Oooow!" I screeched as my whole arm jumped.

"I am sorry," he said calmly, in good English.

He pulled at the torn cloth of my stretch pants and peered at the wound on my leg. The rain washed my blood down in rivulets, onto my sock and shoe, but it looked like no more than a nasty scrape.

The gnarled man set my bike upright. The handlebars and front wheel were mangled. He grinned at me, revealing a mouth of tobacco-stained stumps.

"I have a repair shop," he said, speaking Mandarin slowly, and loudly. "I will fix it for you."

"Xie, xie," I said.

"Where do you live?" he asked.

"Shanghai Teachers University," said Laurie.

"I will bring it to you tomorrow," he said.

The young man asked me if I could move my leg. I wiggled it again.

"I think you have nothing broken," he said.

Laurie looked up and shouted, "Hey!"

The gnarled man was pushing his way out of the crowd, with my bike. He turned around and waved to us and shouted, "Ming tian."

"I wonder if you'll ever see your bike again," said Laurie.

"I think honest," the young man said. He had a gentle, confident voice. I looked up at him. Through the rain, I saw that he was quite handsome. Gaunt, in that brittle way that so many mainlanders are, but with broad, confident shoulders. He had flawless skin, the color of roasted butter, with intelligent, brooding dark-chestnut eyes and an unusual long Roman nose with a delicate little bump where sunglasses could rest, although he wasn't wearing any in the rain. He talked with his whole face, grimacing over the English words, animating his lips and even his perfectly aligned white teeth. As if experimenting with the pronunciation. He still had his hand on my wounded leg, a hand with manly square knuckles but long fingers that moved like fine brushpens.

Mild lust is a simple emotion. I wanted nothing more than to feel the cool touch of his hand and inhale his faint smell of sweet butter.

"I can stand up," I said.

He and Laurie helped me stand up.

"I will welcome you at my apartment," the young man said. "I study for medical doctor and my mother also is a nurse."

"You sit on my bicycle," he added "You also come," he directed Laurie.

Maybe this was a good idea, since I had no idea how clean or accommodating our school infirmary would be. I wasn't even sure that it was open in the evening. I squirmed my rear end onto the bar over his back wheel, and contorted my legs so that my feet were wedged against the minuscule piece of metal that sticks out in the center of the wheel. He sat on the bike and waited patiently.

"Put your arms on me," he commanded.

I grabbed onto his waist. My legs felt cramped, and the scrapes still stung as we rode. He felt firm in spite of being so thin.

Raindrops were still trickling down, fat but not as determined as before.

"What is your name?" he asked me before we got started, articulating each syllable and sounding pleased with the way he said it, probably mimicking a recording in a language lab.

"Fu Mei Lan."

"That is pretty. Your English name is what?"

"Madeleine Fox."

"Also prettier. Does it mean something?"

"Fox means huli." I was showing off something I'd learned from my tutor.

He laughed lightly. "A good luck fox." He drew out the word, baring his nice teeth and making it sound like "faacasa."

I knew what the young Chinese meant when they said good luck. If we got to know each other, he would very likely ask me if I'd be willing to sponsor him, so that he could emigrate to America.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"David."

"Your real name."

"Li Tian He."

He climbed into the seat and we began riding. I jostled on my slippery perch.

Tian He/David waved jauntily, defiantly even, to people who crept alongside us on their bicycles to stare. A foreign woman riding on the back of a Chinese man's bicycle is something to gossip about. If I'd been a Chinese woman and he a foreign man, the police might have stopped us and asked me questions. It happened just last week, when a young American guy who taught English at our school went out with a Chinese girl.

I pressed my head against his slender back to keep from falling. Laurie was ahead of us, and kept looking back to make sure we were still there. She looked at me with a smirk on her face.

Excerpted from Getting to Lamma © Copyright 2002 by Jan Alexander. Reprinted with permission by author. All rights reserved.