The Cost of Hope Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    His work takes him away for long periods of time. He returns to the United States every other month, driving teams of Chinese farmers across the United States, observing U.S. farms, eating with American farmers, listening to translated lectures on essential minerals. While he is gone, I often receive strange letters. One is from a salesman of Chinese herbal medicine, promising me relief from headaches, bad skin, and “lady monthly cramp” if I only buy his brew of snake and dog penis. Another is from an eight-year-old, so excited about her first visit to China that she is sitting on the plane using pencils to practice eating with chopsticks.
    Yet another day, I am sitting in my office when Miss Wang, my interpreter, comes in, a frightened look on her face.
    “Amanda, does someone wish you harm?”
    That morning a letter came in, written entirely in a beautiful Chinese script. I can’t read Chinese, so I passed it on to her. As is her habit, she produces a neat translation on lined paper.
    Oh! My friends!
    My friends who live in the city alongside the River!
    There is big trouble coming your way!
    Yes, I assure you, trouble is on its way to this city
.
    It is the ball game
.
    The ball game will bring you this trouble!
    I read the message slowly, myself totally puzzled. Then I burst out laughing. The city alongside the river? River City! There’s trouble in River City! Terence had translated Harold Hill’s song from
The Music Man
into Chinese and mailed it to me from the road.
    His trips also rip both of us in two. There is no easy phone contact back to the United States—calls must be booked far ahead, sometimes as much as twenty-four hours in advance. He’s seldom in one location long enough for us to talk. Since we fight constantly, every trip is an opportunity for two weeks of unresolved misery. After one fight, he flees my apartment. Furious, I wait till the following day, the eve of his departure, to call. No answer. Ten minutes later. No answer. No answer. No answer. No answer. I run the ten blocks to the Jianguo and find him madly packing, the phone pulled out of the wall.
    I am unhappy when he is around. I am miserable when he is gone. I drive him to the airport and sit in the parking lot watching him go. I cry and cry and cry. How will I survive Beijing for the next ten days? The last day is the hardest. If I can make it to bedtime, then I can sleep. When I wake up in the morning, I can leaveright away for the airport. He will be in at eleven. The phone rings at midnight. “I’ve missed my plane,” in San Francisco. It will be twenty-four hours till the next one. How will I fill the hours till then? Time crawls. Work weighs heavy. The hours between dark and dawn are leaden. Sometimes I awaken suddenly at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. When he is gone, I am alone, and the black night is mine to fill with nothing.
    Do I love him? Do I hate him? I can barely tell the difference. I do know that I need him, and I’m pretty sure I don’t like that fact at all. On his forty-fifth birthday in 1985 I don the burgundy silk dress again, low cut and shimmering. “Put on your tux,” I command. “Meet me at this corner.” I name an intersection at the very edge of the area where foreigners are allowed to visit.
    At 5:00 p.m., I go to fetch him there and find him standing at the dusty crossroads in the September chill. Bicycles zip past him. Peasants are sitting by the side of the road selling vegetables off spread-out blankets. Three-wheel motor carts, called
san lun che
, tootle past, filled with metal shavings, lengths of pipe, pyramids of cabbages, bolts of burlap. Terence’s tuxedo pants are nicely creased, his shoes perfectly polished.
    We are just outside the Summer Palace, the country retreat that the Empress Dowager Cixi starved the Chinese navy of its silver to perfect. In September, the palace’s Kunming Lake is slate flat and clear, reflecting Longevity Hill on its surface. There is nothing that looks