Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--And Save His Life by Daniel Asa Rose

Author:Daniel Asa Rose [Rose, Daniel Asa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780061708718
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-04-22T11:23:11+00:00

WHY I’M MORE AND MORE FREAKED BY CHINA

Now that I’ve left Larry’s room, I can admit that his premonition rattled me. He’s right about so many things. Will he be right about the surgery, too?

The lights are out in the stairwell, and as I blindly feel my way down eight pitch-black flights of stairs, I wonder if Larry’s not the only one with brain damage.

When I reach the street, the city’s inflamed in a firestorm of neon. Swirling dragons. Flaming serpents. It looks as if a demon magician has touched it with an evil wand.

The darkness here’s more diabolical than the darkness at home. As I walk alone down a spooky alleyway, bike riders fly out of the murk like bats on wheels, squealing “Go back to quack-a-doe!”

The air, when all is said and done, is no laughing matter. It’s totalitarian pollution, a one-party blanket of smog so supersaturated that it can’t absorb the smoke from the sidewalk barbecues, much less the blue plumes from firecrackers that erupt out of nowhere, veiling all.

I’m lost. Even though the arms of the hospital are more or less visible through the haze, tonight they spread like the wings of a malevolent owl, leading me nowhere I want to follow.

I’m wet, or about to be. In a spot not far from the hospital, a promenade functions as a nighttime amusement area for adults, between fake volcanic rocks and a patio for old-timers to do their tai chi. But as I’m venturing closer, a fountain of colored water erupts from the rocks, drenching me head to toe.

Wet and lost as I am, I understand that these old-timers were my first enemies. Delicately doing tai chi between the fountains, these are the infamous Red Chinese of my childhood, the ones we were told were sadistically brainwashing American POWs in secret North Korean camps. And here I’ve put myself at their mercy, surrounded by them on all sides….

The next group is even worse. After so many days of not seeing people my age, I run into a whole brigade of them on a terrace by the promenade, and it hits me that they’re the original Red Guards who committed some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. While we student activists were making hay at home with a pretend revolution, our counterparts in China were making real hay, forcing millions out of the cities to reap grain in the countryside, butchering intellectuals and raping ballerinas and turning themselves into the human equivalent of swirling dragons and flaming serpents.

And what’re they doing on this sweltering September night? Waltzing. After all the carnage they wrought, they’re waltzing to old songs from the 1930s playing on an ancient gramophone. “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” “The Touch of Your Hand.” “Falling in Love with Love.” Lit up in the smoglight, their eyes red in the glow of firecrackers, they turn gracefully clockwise, changing steps to turn counterclockwise. How can they be dancing, after all they’ve done, like Nazis doing a jig on the graves of their victims? But they’re sad-looking, and their waltz is sad.

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