The Bitter Tea of General Yen by Grace Zaring Stone

Author:Grace Zaring Stone [Stone, Grace Zaring]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7087-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

XIV

Megan spent the rest of the day on the bed or sitting by the window. She felt no desire to leave her room to see what was beyond the tiled roofs, to meet half-way any new experience. The peace of the General’s yamen began to act as a soporific on her nerves. The one sound that persisted, the distant ringing of the telephone and the Chinese voice, became part of the silence. Only once she heard violent voices outside, which proved to be the amah hysterically haranguing one of the servants, but seeing Megan looking at her from the window the amah smiled as if to reassure her that it was nothing serious, and the quiet became even deeper than before.

Late in the day they brought her some Chinese food, rice and concoctions of meat and fish, bamboo shoots, cabbage, bean sprouts and soy sauce, served in delicate bowls veined like thin flesh. Megan ate adventurously and found it represented a whole new scale of flavors, as outside her experience as the tones of a Chinese musical scale, so that her hunger remained mysteriously unsatisfied.

She was lying on the bed when a knock at the door made her sit up. The orderly with the Mauser on the salmon-pink cord opened the door but instead of the General a much younger and smaller man in the uniform of an officer came into the room.

As without a word he walked over to the table, Megan looked at him with astonishment. She saw that his body and hands appeared to belong to a very young girl, his face suggested the texture of pâte tendre and his black eyes and eyebrows were outlined with exaggerated precision above cheeks that surely had a trace of rouge. If he had been an actor, he would have excelled as an impersonator in female rôles. Evidently he spoke no English for as he put down on the table a roll of papers, a carton of cigarettes, a box of matches and an ash-tray, he said something in Chinese, then bowed and with a smile of thin sweetness turned and went out. If the papers and cigarettes had not been there to prove his reality, Megan would almost have believed him to be an apparition.

They were the Shanghai papers promised by the General. She lay back on the bed to read them. There were pages about the Nanking incident, but for fear she might become angered again, Megan looked only at the head-lines. It was when she saw her name at the head of a column that she felt a sudden sharp excitement.

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