The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [95]
“For speaking English.”
“Why?”
Wu shrugged.
“Cultural Revolution,” he said, as if the phrase explained everything.
“Do you think he’ll ever get his teaching job back?”
“Perhaps.”
I guess they don’t have tenure in China, Neal thought. In the States, once a professor got tenure, you couldn’t fire him if he buggered a goat on his desk during a lecture. You couldn’t get him out of that professional chair with a tow chain and an ox. But here you had English professors getting the sack for … speaking English.
“So what do you think about Mao now?” Neal asked.
Mao now? How now, Mao?
Wu stared at the table. “He liberated the nation, but he made some mistakes, I think.”
Wu was so clearly uncomfortable talking about it that Neal let it drop. It wasn’t the time to push. At this pace, there’d be plenty of time for that later. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry, that was for sure. What were they waiting for, he wondered.
Wu must have figured the conversation had gone on long enough, because he brought them back to touring with a vengeance. They hit the Cultural Park and the tomb of Wang Jian, a Tang Dynasty mercenary and self-styled emperor. They dropped in on the Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which served to refresh Neal’s memory of his bout with acupuncture. They wrapped the afternoon up with a visit to the People’s Park, where seemingly thousands of would-be swimmers were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in three Olympic-size pools.
“You sure have a lot of parks in this town.”
“Chengdu people like to relax.”
They were driving back to the hotel when Wu casually pointed out the Xinhua Bookstore.
“The what?” Neal asked. “Did you say ‘bookstore’?”
“Xinhua Bookstore, yes.”
“Stop the car.”
Neal noticed that the driver hit the brake just a half-second before Wu gave the instruction.
“Let’s walk,” Neal said.
“You are not tired?”
“Suddenly I have all sorts of energy.”
Wu told the driver to meet him in the hotel lot.
“Xiao Wu,” Neal said as the driver pulled away, “do they sell English books here?”
Wu said, “They only sell textbooks at the university.”
“No, I mean books in English. Novels, short stories, the dreaded nonfiction.”
Wu shuffled his foot on the sidewalk. “Perhaps.”
“Come on, Wu.”
“I am not authorized to take you there.”
“Were you ordered not to take me there?”
Wu brightened. “Noooo …”
“Wu … Wu, I haven’t had anything to read in three months. Do you know what that’s like?”
“Are you joking? Cultural Revolution?”
“So help me, Wu.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you my best abusive words.”
“Like what?”
“Cocksucker.”
Neal watched anxiously as Wu put the compound together and a glimmer of understanding came to his eyes.
“Cocksucker,” Wu intoned, his eyes widening. “Does that mean—”
“Yup.”
Wu burst into a hysterical giggle. He repeated the word several times, each repetition sending him into a fresh paroxysm of laughter. He was bent over double on the sidewalk, oblivious to the stares of passersby, muttering “cocksucker” until he cried.
“And that is an abusive term?” he asked when he had caught his breath.
“Oh, you bet.”
“In Chinese … tsweh-tsuh.”
“Tsweh-tsuh.”
That set him off again, and his fresh hysteria set Neal off, and they both stood on the sidewalk laughing until their stomachs hurt and they couldn’t laugh anymore.
“Okay, cocksucker,” Wu said. “Let’s go to the bookstore.”
Bookstore. Bookstore. Wu might as easily have said “Paradise” or “Heaven.” Neal breathed it in as he went through the door. The smell of books, that clean paper smell, filled his nostrils and went straight to his brain. He looked around at the shelves filled with books—all in Chinese, all absolutely incomprehensible to him—and then went around touching them. He stroked their spines, and felt their covers, and examined them as if he understood their titles and could read their pages.
Wu went over to the checkout counter and had a quiet conversation with the clerk. Neal felt his heart sink when the clerk shook his head vigorously,