The truth was, Charles didn’t know—at least not exactly—where the land was. He knew the name of the village, he had photographs of the old family house, and he had pieces of the 1947 surveyor’s measurements and a receipt from a tax assessment, but he didn’t have an address. That was why he’d needed the lawyer. Someone who could make his pile of stories and documents into something tangible. His piss-poor excuse for a lawyer had at least done that, but he’d also dropped an unbelievable story on top of it, which Charles was here to investigate. But before he could do that, he wanted to see his land.
It had been years since Charles had ridden any kind of public transportation. Growing up in Taiwan, he had hung off the sides of buses with his friends, but the train system in China was a different matter altogether. A mass of Beijing residents poured out of the station, engulfing him, though when he turned in the other direction, there seemed to be just as many rushing in. The two opposing tides lapped up against each other, unceasing, merging without incident.
When had the children of China gotten so tall? They towered over him, these little treasures, six feet high and rising. Except for the tiny ones, so skinny that their skin stretched translucent over their toothpick bones; and the broad ones, with their farmboy shoulders and wide, flat faces. Charles felt comforted in this swirl of humanity, in this sea of black hair. If the billion people of China ever chose to march en masse, they would be overwhelming in their similarity and horrific in their differences. There would be so many variations on the theme of human that all typologies would be completely bulldozed. This was why he had never worried himself about how America viewed his children, never bothered himself over unflattering stereotypes and prejudices. What did it matter how a country full of white people saw them when the whole world was theirs?
Out the window, the horror of the postindustrial landscape was obscured by its own waste, a thick brown mist that hung heavy in the sky. The train windows were filmed over with it. Charles peered at the grimy windowsill. Putrid neon gum had hardened in one corner and a fluff of gray down, the vestige of some long-ago disease-ridden bird, mixed with curls of dust. Charles lifted his sleeve from the armrest and moved away from the window. Would it all be like this? Would the longitude and latitude on his deed point towards rows of tenements and factories where children worked for slave wages? A settled town of cheap shops and pasteboard houses that would collapse like they had just months ago in Sichuan after that unimaginable earthquake?
Disappointment crowded in. What would Barbra say if he had come all this way for nothing, for a place that didn’t even exist anymore? Charles closed his eyes and sank into his seat, wishing that he had something to place between his head and the dingy white cover that was meant to protect the top of the train seat from the passengers’ greasy scalps.
Before he even realized that he was asleep, the train screeched to a stop. What is that strange skill that allows us to doze through an unknown route and wake up at the correct station? He rushed to pick up his jacket and bag, glad to leave the train behind.
At the station, Charles waited for nearly an hour before a suspiciously new taxi finally deigned to pull up. It bumped him over a series of rural roads, the driver speaking at first in some sort of dialect that Charles could barely understand before he switched to a flawless Mandarin. On the outskirts of town, they saw a benighted huddle of mud-and-straw huts, shocking in their crudity. Next to them, children rolled an oil drum in a field, but they paused and looked up as the taxi passed. One small girl on the end waved, and Charles waved back, wishing that he could take her with him and put some new, clean clothes on her. A little girl should have a pretty dress. As they got closer to town, the road smoothed out and the houses began to look less haphazard. Charles looked down at the map. The mountains rose in the distance, just as they did on the map, and the road began to curve in a recognizable way towards a body of water in the distance. This was it. Charles felt sick. He couldn’t wait to see it and he didn’t want to look at it at all.
Desire, as always, outweighed fear.
An open ditch ran along the side of the road. Charles directed the driver to park next to it. “This is my family’s old estate,” he explained, proud. “I’m going to have a look at it. Wait here, please, until I return.”
Tapping a cigarette out of a packet marked with a warning label and a photo of a shriveled fetus, the driver spit into the ditch. “How do I know you’ll come back?”
“I’ll leave my bag here with you.”