“You were educated in America?” Wise asked, in front of the rolling camera.
“Yes,” Yu replied over tea. “At Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. My first degree was in electrical engineering, then my divinity degree and my ordination came later.”
“I see you are married,” the reporter observed, pointing to a picture on the wall.
“My wife is away in Taiwan, looking after her mother, who is sick at the moment,” he explained.
“So, how did you two meet?” Wise asked, meaning Yu and the Cardinal.
“That was Fa An’s doing,” the Cardinal explained. “It was he who came to us to extend a greeting to a newcomer in the same—same line of work, one could say.” DiMilo was tempted to say that they enjoyed drinks together, but refrained for fear of demeaning the man before his fellow Baptists, some of whom objected to alcohol in any form. “As you might imagine, there are not so many Christians in this city, and what few there are need to stick together.”
“Do you find it odd, a Catholic and a Baptist to be so friendly?”
“Not at all,” Yu replied at once. “Why should it be odd? Are we not united by faith?” DiMilo nodded agreement at this perfect, if unanticipated, statement of belief.
“And what of your congregation?” Wise asked the Chinese minister next.
The bicycle lot outside was a confused mass of metal and rubber, for few of the Chinese workers owned automobiles, but as Quon helped Lien-Hua to the far corner, the two of them were spotted by someone who did have access to one. He was a factory security guard who drove about the perimeter of the plant very importantly in his three-wheel motorized cart, an accessory more important to his sense of status than his uniform and badge. Like Quon, a former sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, he’d never lost his feeling of personal authority, and this communicated itself in the way he spoke to people.
“Stop!” he called from the driver’s seat in his cart. “What goes on here?”
Quon turned. Lien-Hua had just been hit with another contraction, with buckled knees and gasping breath, and he was almost dragging her to their bikes. Suddenly, he knew that this wasn’t going to work. There was just no way that she could pedal her own bike. It was eleven blocks to their apartment. He could probably drag her up the three flights of steps, but how the hell was he going to get her to the front door?
“My wife is . . . she’s hurt,” Quon said, unwilling— afraid—to explain what the problem really was. He knew this guard—his name was Zhou Jingjin—and he seemed a decent enough chap. “I’m trying to get her home.”
“Where do you live, Comrade?” Zhou asked.
“Great Long March Apartments, number seventy-four’ Quon replied. “Can you help us?”
Zhou looked them over. The woman seemed to be in some distress. His was not a country which placed great value on personal initiative, but she was a comrade in difficulty, and there was supposed to be solidarity among the people, and their apartment was only ten or eleven blocks, hardly fifteen minutes even in this slow and awkward cart. He made his decision, based on socialist worker solidarity.
“Load her on the back, Comrade.”
“Thank you, Comrade.” And Quon got his wife there, lifted her bottom up, and set her on the rusted steel deck behind the driver’s compartment. With a wave, he signaled Zhou to head west. This contraction proved a difficult one. Lien-Hua gasped and then cried out, to the distress of her husband, and worse, the distress of the driver, who turned and saw what ought to have been a healthy woman grasping her abdomen in great pain. It was not a pretty thing to see by any stretch of the imagination, and Zhou, having taken one leap of initiative, decided that maybe he ought to take another. The path to Great Long March Apartments led down Meishuguan Street, past the Longfu Hospital, and like most Beijing teaching hospitals, this one had a proper emergency-receiving room. This woman was in distress, and she was a comrade, like himself a member of the working class, and she deserved his help. He looked back. Quon was doing his best to comfort his woman as a man should, far too busy to do much of anything as the security cart bumped along the uneven streets at twenty kilometers per hour.
Yes, Zhou decided, he had to do it. He turned the steering tiller gently, pulled up to the loading dock designed more for delivery trucks than ambulances, and stopped.
It took Quon a few seconds to realize that they’d stopped. He looked around, ready to help his wife off the cart, until he saw that they weren’t at the apartment complex. Disoriented by the previous thirty minutes of unexpected emergency and chaos, he didn’t understand, didn’t grasp where they were, until he saw someone in a uniform emerge from the door. She wore a white bandanna-hat on her head—a nurse? Were they at the hospital? No, he couldn’t allow that.
Yang Quon stood off the cart and turned to Zhou. He started to object that they’d come to the wrong place, that he didn’t want to be here, but the hospital workers had an unaccustomed sense of industry at the moment—the emergency room was perversely idle at the moment—and a wheeled gurney emerged from the door with two men in attendance. Yang Quon tried to object, but he was merely pushed aside by the burly attendants as Lien-Hua was loaded on the gurney and wheeled inside before he could do much more than flap his mouth open and closed. He took a breath and rushed in, only to be intercepted by a pair of clerks asking for the information they needed to fill out their admitting forms, stopping him dead in his tracks as surely as a man with a loaded rifle, but far more ignominiously.
In the emergency room itself, a physician and a nurse watched as the orderlies loaded Lien-Hua onto an examining table. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for their trained eyes to make the first guess, which they shared with a look. Only a few seconds more and her work clothes had been removed, and the pregnant belly was as obvious as a sunrise. It was similarly obvious that Yang Lien-Hua was in frank labor, and that this was no emergency. She could be wheeled to the elevator and taken to the second floor, where there was a sizable obstetrics staff. The physician, a woman, beckoned to the orderlies and told them where to move the patient. Then she walked to the phone to call upstairs and tell them that a delivery was on the way up. With that “work” done, the doctor went back to the physicians’ lounge for a smoke and a magazine.
“Comrade Yang?” another clerk, a more senior one, said. “Yes?” the worried husband replied, still stuck in the waiting room, held prisoner by clerks.
“Your wife is being taken upstairs to obstetrics. But,” the clerk added, “there’s one problem.”
“What is that?” Quon asked, knowing the answer, but hoping for a miracle, and utterly trapped by the bureaucratic necessities of the moment.
“We have no record of your wife’s pregnancy in our files. You are in our health district—we show you at Number Seventy-two Great Long March Flats. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s where we live,” Quon sputtered out, trying to find a way out of this trap, but not seeing one anywhere.
“Ah.” The clerk nodded. “I see. Thank you. I must now make a telephone call.”
It was the way the last statement was delivered that frightened Quon: Ah, yes, I have to see that the trash is removed properly. Ah, yes, the glass is broken, and I’ll try to find a repairman. Ah, yes, an unauthorized pregnancy, I’ll call upstairs so that they’ll know to kill the baby when it crowns.
Upstairs, Lien-Hua could see the difference in their eyes. When Lu-Long had been on his way, there’d been joy and anticipation in the eyes of the nurses who oversaw her labor. You could see their eyes crinkle with smiles at the corners of their masks.., but not this time. Someone had come over to where she was in labor room #3 and said something to the nurse, and her head had turned rapidly to where Lien-Hua lay, and her eyes had turned from compassionate to . . . something else, and while Mrs. Yang didn’t know what other thing it was, she knew the import. It might not be something the nurse particularly liked, but it was something she would assist in doing, because she had to. China was a place where people did the things they had to do, whether they approved it or liked it or not. Lien-Hua felt the next contraction. The baby in her uterus was trying to be born, not knowing that it was racing to its own destruction at the hands of the State. But the hospital staffers knew. Before, with Ju-Long, they’d been close by, not quite hovering, but close enough to watch and see that things were going well. Not now. Now they withdrew, desiring not to hear the sounds of a mother struggling to bring forth death in a small package.