The Cost of Hope Read Online Free PDF Page A

account for every second of the day and every penny spent; I am working for a woman of temperament and ambition in whose eyes I can seemingly do nothing right. Yet she herself knows little about China and often makes absurd demands in the middle of the night. Her ignorance and impetuousness infuriate Terence. He rails on my behalf at stupid bosses all over the world.
    He scares me with the way he talks to his own boss back home in the United States. I overhear him shouting into the phone across a 6,800-mile divide.
    “No, I will NOT.”
    Silence.
    “You will not do any such thing.”
    Silence.
    “Goddammit. This is MY office, not yours.”
    He slams down the phone.
    I am aghast. You are rude, reckless, undiplomatic, I say. You are spineless, he says. We fight about bosses. We fight about shouting. We fight about fighting.
    We fight about jealousy. Just weeks before coming to China—about eight months before I met Terence—I divorced the man I had been with since I was nineteen years old. Before Terence and I met, I was alone in China, halfway around the world, unmoored, more emotionally strafed than I had expected or had the resources to deal with. Far from home, I had already flung myself into destructive, blindingly wrong, inappropriate relationships that had torn me up inside, and whose lingering traces were snaking through our lives.
    This is my problem, I say, not yours. You’re killing me, he says. This is none of your business, I say. It’s nothing BUT my business. But I am NOT marrying you. In any case, you’re still married yourself. Aha! Trump card! For that is one of the minor biographical details that has recently emerged. Terence is not yet divorced. That’s done, he says. Done. We’ve split up. In fact, he has been living here alone in China since 1980, never even asking his wife to visit. It is now 1984. In his view, he has been a single man for nearly four years now. She’s still your wife, I say.
    Every little thing cuts one or the other of us like a razor. Two wineglasses on a sink. An unanswered phone at midnight. A dropped voice. A stray photograph. An unexplained postmark. Ordinary actions—whether badly understood, misunderstood, or understood only too clearly—become sanity-threatening betrayals. Our emotions are toxic. Powerful. Colliding. I have never met anyone before who can cause me so much pain. It will be a decade before I fully realize that the same can be said for my effect on him.
    I do my job. I live on a farm to see the effects of Deng Xiaoping’s agricultural reforms. I visit factories. Bathhouses. Peking opera. President Reagan comes to visit. So does Nixon.
    Terence does his job. The goal of the American Soybean Association is, of course, to get the Chinese to buy more soybeans from American farmers. Terence’s goal is nothing of the sort. Hehas nothing but contempt for the
businessmen
(he says it like one would say “terrorist” or “prostitute”) who want to
profit
from an underfed country. “I want to feed hungry people,” he says.
    There are hundreds of millions of hungry people in China. Even in the relatively well-nourished city, men are so thin their belts loop all the way around their narrow bodies and flap out the back. Workmen fall asleep on every possible surface. Cinder blocks. Piles of metal shavings. Few are getting entirely enough to eat, and certainly not enough protein. Terence thinks soy can change all that. Pigs are fed on table scraps, so he sets up pilot programs, raising sets of scrawny piglets on the traditional diet side by side with soy-fed animals that grow big and robust. He brings in new varieties of swine, bred for protein and away from fat. He brings in experts on chickens and eggs. He knows the proper composition of a chicken’s diet in winter, and the proper composition in summer. He knows how to say “artificial insemination” and “ribonucleic acid” in Chinese. He travels to the south to teach aquaculture. To the north to help