Stove City

It is strange, looking back, to think how different things could have been. Years ago, the company I work for undertook a number of joint ventures in China. We didn’t understand the place well, but the industry was in transition, and it was felt that we had to move quickly. If we waited to understand everything, we risked missing a crucial moment—so the thinking went, anyway. The frequent long trips were tiring and put a strain on my marriage. My former wife said I was using the travel to avoid problems at home. That’s hard to sort out. That she also called me a sociopath will give an idea of where we had gotten to. The marriage ended, and my two sons wound up residing with their mother and her new husband in Asheville, North Carolina.

My life changed a lot, quickly. I didn’t care about work anymore. I missed my sons. I was alone a lot, and I found myself striking up conversations in grocery-store checkout lines, sharing perhaps too much, as though I had forgotten how to keep a proper sane distance from people. I got a dog, and when a visit to Nanchang was proposed, I used the new dog as an excuse. “I shouldn’t leave her right now,” I said. “Send somebody who doesn’t have a dog. Like Caroline.”

Caroline was one of the staff attorneys. “I’ll go if you will,” she said.

Well, that was a surprise. I hadn’t expected that. I didn’t think it would happen. So of course, yes—I would go to Nanchang with Caroline. I was up for that.

Nanchang, I learned, is known as one of China’s Four Stove Cities. It was May and very hot. And crowded. I went for a long walk that first afternoon, hoping to wear myself out, then fall asleep and wake up adjusted to China time. Small motorcycles buzzed among the diesel trucks, and the sidewalks were jammed with people. Big cities have always given me a funny pang—so many strangers up against one another. I was obviously a foreigner—I walked an hour without seeing another Western face. I barely knew how to say hello in Chinese, and my head was full of questions I had no way to ask. The day was dry and hazy, and yet here was a young woman carrying an open umbrella—shielding herself from what, exactly? And what was that slippery purple vegetable the man was eating at the edge of a quarter acre of parked bicycles? Another man, about my age, early forties, was sitting on a box outside the subway holding a US dollar like a little sign in front of his white dress shirt. Was he begging? Was it art? A white-haired woman in army-green sneakers picked litter off the sidewalk with a long set of bamboo tongs. What sort of home life did she return to? Who would meet her there? 

Back at the Jiangxi Hotel, I had a single bed, a short white bathrobe, and a pair of white slippers. The hotel was fine. A flask of boiled water had been provided. I had my suit for the next day’s meetings and a case full of gifts to hand out—product samples, really, sunglasses and household gadgets, useful items all featuring some resin or polymer manufactured by our company. I had company hats. A binder contained my itinerary, plus the names of the engineers and government officials I’d be meeting, along with their ranks and roles, insofar as we understood them. And a page of rules: Don’t drink from the tap; don’t tip in restaurants; always accept a gift with both hands; for table etiquette, follow the lead of your translator. In case there are any problems, call Jason Wang. Et cetera.

By the bed there was a door. Caroline and I had been placed in adjoining rooms. Had she arranged this? It was nice to imagine she had. But Caroline wasn’t there, she was back in Tennessee, having called in sick that morning, or whatever morning it was—twenty-something hours, twelve or thirteen time zones ago. “I’ve come down with something,” she said. It was her gentle way of telling me, On second thought, no.

I took a shower and lay down on the bed, but I found I was wide awake. My mind was racing, clicking through thoughts I didn’t want to think, memories I didn’t want to remember. Those trips really messed with my sleep. I could feel worn out and jittery at the same time. At home I kept a bottle of bourbon for these moments, but I didn’t have that with me now. I dressed and carried my binder to the elevator, which smelled like burning wires, and into the restaurant. The kitchen had closed, but I was able to order a beer, which I charged to my room number.

The white tablecloth was clean. There were butts in the ashtray. The restaurant was empty except for myself, the waiter, and, a couple tables over, a man with a baby. The man looked American, with his cargo shorts and T-shirt. After I heard him settle up with the waiter, I said hello.

He was from Phoenix, I think he said. He and his wife had arrived in Nanchang two nights before. The baby had been brought to them there.

I offered to buy him a beer.

“Can’t,” he said. He rattled an orange prescription bottle. His other hand was wrapped in gauze. He held the bandaged hand slightly raised, palm up, with his elbow on the table. “It’s been a hard two days,” he said. “We aren’t doing great so far.”

“She is your first?”

“First and final.”

Our first son had been a handful too, I told him. “Sleep deprivation is a form of torture.”

Yes, he knew that. That was why he was here in the restaurant—so his wife could get some sleep upstairs. “The baby cried all afternoon. She is eleven months old. In the room it was hell. She screamed herself hoarse. My wife became hysterical. We weren’t prepared for this.”

“Nobody’s ever ready for their first,” I said.

Okay, it was a trite remark.

“You do not understand,” he said. “This whole thing,” he said, waving as if to show me the room. He described the lengthy adoption process. They’d paid a social worker to examine their home and marriage. Fingerprints, medical exams. Endless documents that had to be notarized, certified, and authenticated. Even now they were not done. In the morning they would carry the baby and a fat zipper pouch of documents to the adoption registration office, where they would present small gifts and attempt to correctly pronounce her Chinese name before receiving the stamped and embossed page that would make the adoption final.

I did know something about the formalities of doing business in the PRC, but I let it go. I asked him, “What did you do to that hand?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“Okay. Don’t tell me, then.”

This seemed to please him. He smiled.

The baby started crying. Not loud at first. The man offered a bag of Cheerios, but she showed no interest.

Grimly, using just the one hand, he produced several items from a diaper bag and arranged them on the table. He dropped a liner into a bottle, and into the liner he measured scoops of two different white powders. He poured in steaming water from a flask. He added some room-temperature water.

I was thinking, Just give him time, he’ll get better at this. He ought to have measured out the powder in advance, so that he only needed to add the water now.

He worked a rubber nipple into a rim and managed to screw it down onto the bottle one-handed—he was getting it! But by now the baby was howling. She really was incredibly loud. The man shook the bottle and held it to her face.

With a gasp, she clapped both hands on it and began sucking.

Her focus was intense. I can still see the cross expression on her face. The lowered eyebrows. She looked off sternly into nowhere, working on her bottle with a steady, wet clicking sound. It was serious work.

The clicking slowed. Her eyelids drooped. The clicking stopped.

“Thank you,” the man said.

He took the bottle from her loose hands and set it in the basket under the stroller. He asked me if I was going to be around for a minute.

“I should get to bed,” I said. “Busy day tomorrow.”

“I just need a word with my wife,” he said. “We could use a minute without the threat of being screamed at by an eleven-month-old.”

I found it an odd request, and probably not a good one. Why should he trust me? He just met me.

“We’re having a difficult time,” he said. “If you could give me ten minutes.”

I checked my watch. Jason Wang was meeting me for breakfast first thing in the morning.

“I can do ten minutes,” I said.

An hour went by. The waiter said it was time for the restaurant to close. I asked him did he happen to have the room number of the man I’d been speaking with.

He looked at the receipt. “I may not tell you that information,” he said, almost disappointed.

“No problem,” I lied. I pushed the stroller into the quiet, dim lobby, where I parked it, and the sleeping baby, and myself, between a pair of porcelain vases. The vases were quite tall—you could have hidden a grown man inside one—and they were decorated on their sides with craggy mountain scenes and a pagoda in blue. The marble floor was dusty. Beyond glass doors, a smudgy streetlight glowed.

Back home in Tennessee it was ten thirty in the morning—a time I’d normally have been visiting the office coffee maker, hoping to find Caroline alone.

I thought about her all the time.

We’d had one night together, at a Country Inn and Suites off I-40. We were driving back from a meeting in Nashville when it started to snow. The storm was unexpected, and it was astonishingly pretty. Soft, white lumps swooped in at the windshield as we drove. We joked about stopping to make a snowman by the highway. A snow fort, an igloo. We didn’t see this kind of weather often in Tennessee. The snow came heavier, and the road began to feel unsafe. We said, Should we stop? Alongside that question was another question, not posed out loud—something like, Are you thinking what I am thinking? 

We stopped, and we got one room.

What was great was not only what happened, but the way it happened. That moment when we somehow agreed to a thing that neither of us had said. The way things changed between us, quietly and fast. Like mind reading. Unlikely, I know—but in the morning I slipped out to fix us some waffles at the breakfast bar, and when I got back to the room, she called from the shower that she was hungry for waffles. Now explain that.

Her husband I had met only a couple of times—at a Christmas party, at Delchamps. He was a compact man with dark hair and kind of wild, shadowy eyes. He was one of those too-handsome men. He was so good-looking I felt embarrassed for him. He could never be taken seriously. He had a PhD, or almost—all but dissertation. They’d been trying to have children, Caroline said. There was an issue with his sperm. He was into triathlons or something like that, training all the time, and otherwise, he appeared to me to be little more than a mopey, gloomy, excessively handsome house pet.

In contrast to Lily, I will add, whose good looks matched her disposition so naturally and well. Lily was my dog. In Lily were combined the two most beautiful and highest virtues—I’ve thought about this, and I mean it—the two very highest virtues of all conscious life, which are 1) likes to play and 2) gentleness.

I cite her enjoyment of car rides. Window partly down, head out, nose working.

I cite, further, the sweet and gentle way in which, toward the end of each car ride, when we went through the drive-thru at Pal’s, where I would order us a snack—the sweet and gentle way she would sit up on the front seat, motionless, observing my every move while I parked, shut the engine off, and brought from its wrapper her plain hot dog. Long strings of clear drool dropped from her mouth as she waited, trustingly, super-focused yet patient. I would hold the meat out to her, and she would accept it in her teeth, tip her head back, and swallow the whole thing in a couple of nods. Then she would circle and lie down on the seat while I got to work on a chili dog in my slow way.

We went for a ride nearly every Sunday afternoon, after I’d called the boys. The calls didn’t always go well. I was trying to squeeze a lot of parenting into those Sunday calls.

We’d drive by the plant. The facility dates back to the 1930s, and it runs for more than a mile along both banks of the Holston River. It’s like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, with endless vats and tanks, condensers, heat exchangers, complicated runs of pipe, towers connected by catwalks, smokestacks with iron rungs fixed into the sides…everything on a massive scale, but with ladders or long skinny stairways spiraling over the surfaces, for when some antlike human has to creep up the side of something and turn a wrench. Nobody understands it all. Each process has its own team of engineers. At night, great billows of steam climb through the orange-pink security lights and roll away over town, fragrant with xylene, acetic acid, and acetone. “Smells like money,” as they say in Kingsport.

And we’d drive through the old neighborhood, sometimes, past our old house, which was now home to a family of five.

Occasionally I would see him running. That gloomy, overly handsome lone figure in his black tights and vest. I’d see him anywhere, miles from his home. Running for hours. Worrying about his sperm, I imagined.

“Look at that guy,” I’d say to Lily. “Mister Handsome. That’s the guy whose wife we’re going to steal.”

She’d look at me. Those big eyes.

I explained to Lily the ethics of this project. “Sometimes people are trying too hard to stay together,” I said. “Sometimes people are together who should not be. It’s like at the place where I got you. Like they told me at the shelter, sometimes the first match is not a good match, and you have to say, Look, I am not the right person for this animal. All this running he does—it tells me he’s avoiding something.”

Lily was a fine listener. I did a lot of explaining to her in those days after the divorce, and she never once questioned my reasoning or motives.

I must have dozed off. I woke up thinking I had forgotten to feed Lily, and I was disoriented when I looked around the dim lobby and found myself between the craggy mountain scenes on the tall porcelain vases. I turned and saw the dark-haired child was watching me from the stroller.

She sat straight, head up, regarding me with a stolid air. She had pushed her blanket off. It was on the floor.

I checked my watch. It was crazy late, way past midnight. I needed to get upstairs, get in bed, and sleep at least an hour or two before the day’s meetings. There was no one at the lobby desk. I tried the restaurant doors. They were locked. I gave the doors a rattle, rapped on the glass. Rapped again, loudly.

Behind me, the girl gave a soft cry. Her bottle still had some liquid in it. When I offered the bottle, she blocked it with the side of her hand.

She shifted her weight, a look of discontent on her mouth. A slight frown.

I found a bag of pretzels in my pocket. I offered her a pretzel. She bit it, revealing four white square teeth. I offered another. She reached to take the bag. It was one of those miniature pretzel bags they give you on the plane.

I gave her the bag and she pushed her hand through it, splitting it down the side, spilling pretzels and salt across her front.

Her face changed. She shook the empty bag. Her eyes changed. They opened wider. Her body seemed to tense up. A look came across her face—I can only call it a look of pure wonder and absorption. It was the bag itself that interested her. The bag was made of this stuff that in the industry we call metallized PET film. You’ve seen it in disposable packaging. A thin layer of aluminum is applied on one surface. It costs more than plain clear plastic, but it is nearly impervious to light and vapor. We make it in Kingsport and also in Indonesia.

The bag was bright silver inside. She shook the torn pretzel bag, and it made a crinkling sound and glinted in the dim yellow light of the lobby. Her jaw fell open. Like a starlet from silent-movie days, she had this theatrical look of goggle-eyed amazement. Only it wasn’t theater—it was just pure, straight-up wonder and surprise at this shiny, crinkly stuff she had found. She laughed.

The metallized PET film reminded me why I was there. Which reminded me of something else I knew, that, despite long preparations, despite any number of gifts and handshakes, nothing is final until it is final.

I stood up too quickly and fell back into the chair, lightheaded. I stood again, pushed the stroller to the front desk, and dinged a bell until a sleepy clerk emerged from the back. Upstairs, I explained, there was an American couple, I did not know their names, and I urgently needed to speak with them about this baby in the stroller. The clerk’s response was to call another clerk, and I was saying the same thing over again when another bell sounded behind me.

From the elevator, a woman lunged. She was dressed in a yellow tank top, sweatpants, and socks. She scanned the room, then sprinted across the marble floor, reaching for the child. I didn’t try to stop her. I wasn’t going to physically wrestle the child from this woman. The woman was a little frightening to me. The ferocity of her alarm, the keening of her voice. She dropped to her knees and placed her hands on the girl, touching her as though to feel if there were anything wrong or missing, holding both sides of her face, then her feet, then her hands. The woman let out a sob. The girl began to wail too. The woman lifted her carefully by the armpits, gently freeing her legs from the stroller, and pressed the girl to her body, drumming her back with rapid, soft pats as she backed up and turned away from me.

The husband arrived. “I fell asleep,” he said.

“It’s for the best,” I said. “Better to find out now than when it is too late.”

“Find out what?”

“That you are not the right people for this child.”

He ran his good hand over his face and gave me a long, dull look. He took a step closer to me.

When I looked again for his wife, she was gone, back up the elevator with the girl. Maybe she was smarter than her husband, I thought.

“Tell me your name,” I said.

He cocked his head, puzzled.

“Your name. Clearly you don’t want her, you’re not ready—you told me that yourself, and then you went off and left her in a restaurant.”

He flinched. “I didn’t leave her. I fell asleep.”

“You’re hearing this, right?” I said to the two clerks.

“Hold up. We’ve worked hard for this baby. We’re a family now. That’s it. That’s the deal.”

“Well, making deals is slow, but breaking deals is easy.”

He cradled his bandaged hand. His eyes searched up toward the ceiling.

“Tell me this man’s name,” I said to the clerks.

They shook their heads no.

The man’s good hand found the handle of the stroller. It was a cheap, foldable one with a cartoon duck and some misspelled English words on it. He seemed lost. Then, as though noticing the stroller and remembering what it was for, he steered it away toward the elevator.

I was in the restaurant drinking coffee and thinking when Jason Wang arrived. A young man, neatly dressed, he looked me over, asked if I’d been drinking. I was behind on sleep, and I’d missed a meal or two, but I wasn’t drunk.

“You don’t look steady,” he said.

I asked him if he knew where in this city an adoption would be registered.

“Probably it is the same place where you register a marriage. I know where it is.”

I told him I wanted him to take me there, and why. He stared at the floor with an irritated attention as I went through my plan.

“This is not a good idea,” he said. “Why would you want to ruin someone’s life?”

I saw it differently, I told him.

“Staying in an orphanage, that is not so good,” Jason said.

“Maybe somebody else will adopt her, though. Maybe I will adopt her.”

“Do you have a wife?”

“I do not, but maybe I soon will.”

Honestly, it was one of those moments—I saw it in his face. I watched his opinion of me change. It was more than a no, it was the look of someone deciding that his time has been wasted.

He lit a cigarette. “You should go upstairs and rest,” he said. He looked at his watch. “One hour. Go to bed.”

I got in bed awhile. Later that morning, Jason moved me to a different hotel, then drove me to an industrial park. I met engineers and officials. I gave them hats and had a long dinner with them, and over the next several days I gave out all my product samples and had several more dinners, each less cordial than the last. I saw we had entered that phase of the visit where everyone knows there is going to be no deal, but we are still exchanging handshakes, small gifts, and business cards.

I got food poisoning, but it passed in a day. I went home. Caroline informed me that she and her husband were trying therapy. I told her it wouldn’t work, but I knew I was only saying that out of spite and more than a little bit of heartbreak. She had called me while her husband was out running. It was the last time we talked in this way, as people who had formerly been close. After that, when she addressed me at all, it was in a group setting, at the office.

She transferred to Chicago, and it was maybe a year later that we heard she’d had a baby. I sent a note, never heard back—which I understand. Things worked out as they did, and I feel friendly toward them now. Even her husband. Nowadays, I go on Facebook, I post a picture of my dog—Lucy, my current dog—and maybe look up an old friend while I’m there. I’ve got a number of people I check on that way, whose progress I follow from a distance.

Caroline posted a picture of her daughter the other day. Her daughter is twenty! A double major, biochemistry and music. Seeing her picture made me think of that other family too. I would like to know what came of them. I have no way to look them up, of course. I never did learn their names. I saw them only once more in Nanchang. I was standing outside the restaurant, waiting for Jason to finish another cigarette. He was delaying, and I was confused. I saw them cross the lobby. The man held his bandaged hand in front of him. With his other arm he clutched a black zipper pouch to his chest. What was I going to do, run and grab it away? The woman, in a dark skirt and jacket, appeared composed—shoulders back, head up, chin set. She pushed the stroller, and I looked for the girl’s dark hair and brown eyes, hoping she might happen to look back at me.