Grace Chan Read online

  I eventually lost touch with Jingfei. She moved to Wuhan University to study history. We stayed in contact for a while, chatting online for the first few months. We spoke about taking a holiday together: a tour of England and Scotland, to learn Western history. Gradually, our chats grew further and further apart. Jingfei had a new group of friends and a series of boyfriends. I, on the other hand, tended to make only professional contacts at university. We never took our Western holiday.

  Sometimes, I replay the last video chat we had. We were twenty years old. It was a mundane conversation. We discuss Jingfei’s boyfriend’s physical flaws and which instant noodle flavor is the best. Jingfei gets a phone call from a lecturer, so we end our chat. There’s a note of melancholy in our voices as we say goodbye, as though we both know the end of our friendship has arrived.

  Much later, someone tells me that Jingfei left China, had a child with a white man, and lives on the coast of Ireland. I’m not sure if these are anything more than rumors. From time to time, I’m taken back to the night that she came to my room sobbing. The memory has an addictive quality to it: one of those that you relish, because it’s both familiar and unsettling. I remember her face, in the glow of the hall light, sunken with grief, twisted with wrath. I remember the bed cocooning us from the world, and her thin body shaking against mine. I can still feel the strange mixture of terror and anticipation that settled over us in a quiet web.

  2115 AD

  I am twenty-six, and in a bar.

  The air stinks of sweat and beer. A cacophony of noise washes over me. They are playing twentieth century American music videos on the holoscreens. A woman in an astronaut costume dances on a stage illuminated with candy canes and rainbows. The subtitles are nonsensical.

  I wrestle through a sea of warm bodies to reach the bar. Somehow, I have collected a piece of chewing gum on my shoe and a sticky patch on my elbow. A man in a gray suit with gold-capped teeth grins at me and asks me if I want some raff. I shake my head.

  “Drink?” the bartender yells.

  I glance back at my table, where my colleagues are waiting, and hold up two fingers with a questioning look. One of them cheekily puts up three fingers in reply. I smile and order two jugs of a crisp, pale Japanese lager.

  The jugs are pushed across the counter. Now for the treacherous return journey. I have already come to terms with the fact that my silk shirt will not survive the night. I detour around a pack of girls who are gyrating to the American beats, and dodge a tall fellow arguing with someone in his earpiece. I’ve almost made it to the safety of the table when a voice calls my name.

  “Lian?”

  I turn around, beer sloshing. A man about my height stands a few paces away. A red Bayern Munchen cap shades part of his face. I don’t recognize him at first. Then, his lively eyes meet mine from beneath the cap’s brim, and something in the mannerism jogs a long-buried memory.

  “Gen?” I say incredulously.

  The last time we saw each other was at graduation. By then, we weren’t close friends, and we didn’t keep in touch throughout university. I’d heard that he went overseas to study. He certainly looks like a foreigner now. In that bright hat, with his shaggy hair curling over his ears, he stands out from the crisp, restrained Chinese men around us.

  “I thought it had to be you,” he grins. “Here, do you need a hand with those?”

  “No, no.” I turn and put the beers down in front of my colleagues with an apologetic smile.

  “Who’s he? An old boyfriend?”

  “A childhood friend,” I say, unsure if I’ve chosen the right words.

  “Hurry up, then. Don’t keep him waiting.”

  “Buy him a drink, too! Something strong!”

  I walk over to Gen and he holds out his arms. I’m surprised by the warmth of his hug. Is this a Western thing, to hug without hesitation, without thinking about the end of the hug? I pull away.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I say, exactly at the same moment he says, “It’s been, what, ten years?”

  We laugh.

  “It’s too noisy in here,” he says. “Let’s go outside.”

  We escape the fog of pounding music and sticky air, into the brisk, neon night. We stand in an alley, leaning against brick walls, facing each other. The noise of honking cars comes to us distantly. Behind Gen is a vintage comic shop, decorated with posters of busty cartoon women. The white eye of the moon looks down at us. I relish the sensation of goose bumps rising on my skin.

  “Nine years,” I correct him. “We graduated at seventeen.”

  “That’s right.” Gen pulls his hat off and runs his hand through his hair. I must have seen him do the same thing a hundred times as a child. His hair is parted in the middle and so long that it almost reaches his collar. “God, nine years. What luck, running into you on my first night back in Hong Kong.”

  “This is your first night back?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “In nine years? You didn’t come back once, to visit your mothers and fathers?”

  He shrugs. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

  “Where did you go? Europe, wasn’t it?”

  “Germany. I studied social sciences, then worked as a teacher in different schools, in a few different countries. It was a good time. I saw a lot of new places, met a lot of new people.” He turns his lively eyes upon me. “What about you?”

  “I’ve been here,” I say. “Plodding along.”

  “Anthropology, right? At graduation, you said you wanted to learn about people.”

  I’m surprised he remembers. I stare at the poster behind him. A curvaceous woman with blue skin and orange hair stares back at me. There is a fierceness and seductiveness about her that sends a shiver of fear through my body. “I changed degrees.”

  “Oh, what happened?”

  “I transferred to biology in second year.” On the tip of my tongue is the reason I give everyone: I prefer the sciences to the arts. But then I say, “My first-mother wanted me to do something more grounded.”

  “Did you like biology?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What do you do now?”

  I smile at him. “I’m a geneticist.”

  “Lian, a geneticist.” A mirror-image smile spreads over his face. “Do you like it?”

  “I do.” I picture the clean surfaces of my laboratory and the methodical pages of my notebook. “My research group searches for risk genes related to intelligence. Each gene we identify allows the next group of children to be smarter. It’s exciting, you know, to be doing something that makes a tangible difference.”

  He nods.

  “Sometimes I think about how mad it is that I went from being a jigsaw child in a Children’s Center, to a jigsaw adult making more jigsaw children.”

  Gen laughs. “It is a little mad. Everything’s a little mad.”

  “I’m jealous of you, Gen.”

  “Why?”

  “Seeing other places.”

  “Where have you traveled?”

  “I haven’t.”

  Gen blinks. “Not at all?”

  “I haven’t left China.”

  “You’re kidding,” says Gen, leaning back against the wall. “That needs to change.”

  I study him covertly. In his T-shirt and jeans, he exudes ease. I search for the subtle paunch around the tummy sported by many Chinese businessmen, but Gen’s torso is lean. He looks like he’d be as comfortable foraging in bushland as he would in a classroom. I imagine him running a cross-country ultramarathon, from Germany back to Hong Kong. Next to him, I feel soft and stagnant.

  “Why’d you come back, Gen?”

  A siren blasts, somewhere in the city. Gen crosses his tanned arms across his chest, and then uncrosses them. “I missed China,” he says. His voice is thick with defeat. “I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to live somewhere else, to forget this place. But as soon as I stepped off the plane today, I felt it in my bones. Even though the buildings look bigger and str
anger now—this is still my home. I can’t escape it.”

  I absorb his sadness, observe it, but don’t quite understand it. “It’s good to know your roots,” I offer.

  He nods. We both look up at the latticework of city lights, and the moon beyond.

  “How long will you stay?” I venture.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he says, and he gives me an intent look that sends another shiver of fear down my spine.

  * * *

  I remember walking back to my university dormitory one evening after a late class. It was the middle of winter, and the sun had already set. A young student, about my age, darted out from behind a building and spat on me. “Alien jigsaw,” she hissed. She wore a thin red armband that marked her as a protester, one of those people who rejects new technology out of a misguided and backward morality. I don’t think the incident affected me too much, but I always wondered how she knew I was a Center child. Perhaps it was something in the way I moved.

  It was a tense time. In 2105, thirty years after the first Children’s Center opened in New Beijing, an international research group published an epidemiological study. The study looked at crime rates in countries that had adopted genome splicing and Children’s Centers, such as China, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the Korean Nations, and compared them to countries in the European Union and the United States, where genome splicing was widespread but social regulation was minimal.

  The group found that crime had decreased in countries that adopted both splicing and Children’s Centers. Crime rates were not much changed in countries with less regulated genome splicing. The authors argued that highly regulated social structures were necessary for social progress with such rapid developments in genetic nanotechnology.

  But then, a second research group reexamined the data and published additional findings that unsettled the global community. Although crime rates were lower in countries with socially regulated genome splicing, the crimes that did occur were remarkable for their high levels of premeditation, bizarreness, and violence.

  Academics, policy makers and laypeople pounced on these secondary findings. Perhaps tailored reproduction focused its attention too heavily on eliminating physical illness, without sufficient consideration of mental illness. Perhaps impulsivity as a trait was downregulated by the splicing and socialization process, leading to criminal acts that were more premeditated. Psychologists began to study the characteristics of children in Centers, looking for signs of callous and unemotional traits, decreased empathy, and disordered attachment. Initial results were inconclusive, which only generated further speculation.

  It was in this climate that I graduated from the East Hong Kong Children’s Center. We were the new version of human, patched with an upgrade that hadn’t had all the bugs ironed out. We were a little different, a little special. A little scary.

  2122 AD

  “Do you think you will ever cook claypot rice without burning it?” I ask, peering into the bowl of charred tofu, pineapple, vegetables, and rice.

  Gen elbows me aside. “Hey, hey. Didn’t I order you out of the kitchen? It tastes better when it’s crispy. Now out. You’re supposed to remain horizontal until the food is ready. You’ve had a long day. Put your feet up.”

  Smiling, I refill my glass of white wine and retreat to the couch. I’m only a few paces away. The apartment is a typical Hong Kong space: twenty meters square, a single room subdivided into corners for cooking, eating, lounging, and sleeping. It’s enough for the two of us. I kick my shoes off and tuck myself in amongst a pile of cushions. Within a few minutes, Gen joins me, carrying two bowls of fragrant rice.

  We eat silently, watching the day’s news flicker across the projector. World leaders convening at an emergency environmental summit in New Delhi as an extreme heat wave mounts over South Asia. The summit was stormed by farmers begging for more resources to sustain their crops. A violent shooting in Malaysia, thought to be driven by genetic discrimination, the perpetrator targeting natural-born protesters who resisted government-mandated sterilization. A video update from one of the Mars colony celebrity families, holding a second birthday party for their son James, a genuine Martian.

  Gen turns the projector off and pours us another round of wine. We lie on the couch for a long while. I play a little game with myself, where I try to make no noise, no movement, and think no thoughts, for as long as I can. I’ve played this secret game ever since I was a child. I sometimes wonder, if I’m not doing anything, then what’s to say I still exist? Then, of course, I catch myself thinking this thought, and I lose the game.

  Gen strokes my hair, starting at the top of my forehead, to the crown of my head, and down to the nape of my neck. Warmth fills me from the top down.

  “Gen,” I say.

  “Hm?”

  “Can you hum a tune?”

  “What tune?”

  “Any tune.”

  “Anything?”

  “Mm. Something gentle and low.”

  “OK.”

  He starts to hum a sort of lullaby. I burrow into his voice. The dips and eddies wash over me, tugging me into a swelling tide. I close my eyes, trying to find that elusive place where the whole world seems safe and peaceful. But Gen’s humming is too brisk, and his melody too lively. It’s all wrong. I squeeze my eyes tightly to fill my vision with squiggly lines.

  “Lian?”

  “Mm?”

  “It’s my birthday next week.”

  “Yes, I know. I haven’t forgotten.”

  “I’m turning thirty-three.”

  “A significant number,” I say, with dramatic flair. “A lucky number. Life upon life.”

  He wriggles out from beneath me, so that he can look me full in the face. “Lian, I’m ready to have a baby.”

  “Oh, what?” I sit up, almost knocking him off the couch. “I didn’t think you’d—really? You want to submit an application?”

  He licks his lips and pushes his long hair behind his ears. “I want to have a baby with you.”

  “You want us to submit a joint application? I guess I could do that. I hadn’t really thought about becoming a mother yet. But you know the National Lab doesn’t guarantee joint parentage.”

  Gen looks at me.

  “Oh, Gen. No. No way.”

  I know where this has come from. He’s been hanging out with odd acquaintances from overseas, people on the fringes of society, discussing controversial, anti-government topics. Over the past few months he’s talked about finally taking me to Europe. Once or twice, he joked about booking a one-way ticket.

  “Lian, I thought maybe we could think about it.”

  “That’s not something I would even consider.”

  Disappointment darkens his face.

  “It’s hardly even feasible,” I say. “I’d have to have my implant removed. For you, it’s even more extreme. You’d need surgery to reverse the procedure. No surgeon in China will do that for you. And that’s only the beginning. What happens during the pregnancy? Where will I live? What doctor would look after me and deliver the baby? Do you want me to fly to Egypt or Bangladesh to pop out our baby? Do you want to have a Chinese baby in a third-world country? Have you even considered this?”

  “I just wanted to talk about it with you,” says Gen. “I thought you’d be a bit more open-minded about this.”

  “It’s not about being open-minded. What you’re suggesting is illegal!”

  “In China, yes.”

  “We are Chinese,” I say flatly.

  Gen rolls his eyes and sighs. He says nothing for a minute. Then, in a lower tone, he says, “Do you remember the stuff you said when we were thirteen?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That day us boys came back from the surgery. We were in Chao’s room. Remember? It got a bit heated, and you brought Chao down from his high horse. You said, ‘There are countries out there that do things differently from China. There are natural-born children living in homes, just as happy and smart as we are
.’”

  “That was twenty years ago, Gen. I hardly remember what I said.”

  “Your words really stayed with me, you know, after that night. They stuck in my head, and I haven’t been able to shake them, even twenty years on.”

  I lower my glass. “Well, that’s a bit silly. I was thirteen. I had no idea what I was talking about. I hadn’t even left China—and I still haven’t! Chao was probably right, and I was wrong.”

  I can’t stand the way Gen is looking at me now—like I’ve peeled off a mask to reveal a devil’s face. I turn away from him. There’s nowhere to escape to in this tiny box of an apartment.

  “So, you don’t believe what you said back then?”

  “I think it’s selfish to have a natural-born baby when tailored reproduction is offered to us on a silver platter.”

  “I don’t see a platter. I see gruel being forced down our throats.”

  “There’s no need to be melodramatic.”

  “It’s about choice, Lian! Freedom. For fuck’s sake.”

  “I choose not to have a child peppered with risk mutations.”

  “Our grandparents were fine.”

  I stand up and pace around the cramped space. Four paces, left turn. Four paces, left turn. Four paces, left turn. There’s nowhere to go. I’m assaulted by memories of my grandparents dying of cancers and infections, racked with pain, shriveled to bags of bones. I remember my Erma, in that stifling room in Tuen Mun Hospice, overrun with tubes, exhaling her life in slow, sour breaths. I don’t want that sort of death for anyone, let alone my child.

  “I can’t talk to you anymore,” I say. Without looking at Gen, I open the door of the apartment and walk out, slamming it behind me.

  After that day, I begin spending more time at work, obsessing over the next breakthrough in identifying risk mutations. Gen begins spending more time with his anti-government friends, drinking and talking until late in the night. I wonder if he’s met another woman, but I can hardly muster up the appropriate jealousy.