“I know why I came here,” I say. “Looking at you, so young, I understand. Larry and I were young together. Now he’s facing death. But he’s the first person I care about in my family’s generation to be up against it like this. There was no way I was going to let death take him without a fight.”

“I understand this,” Jade says.

“Even a baby fight, even a token resistance. This was my protest, my shrimpy sit-down strike, saying you can’t snatch us that easily, every damn time, we’ve got to be able to postpone the inevitable just a tiny bit longer…”

“I am capable to understand all this.”

“I know you are. Whatever is the true, whatever is the false, I know you know.”

“I do,” she says.

“We’re still naïve, you and me. I’m the most naïve of all, to think I could come here without knowing anyone and score an illegal kidney. To think that Larry has the golden heart even though I’ve seen the awful tarnish on it. This kind of naïveté is irresponsible, reckless-the Disapproving Docs are right!-almost inexcusable. And yet I keep it, I prize it…”

“Me as well.”

“To feel about you the way I do-”

But we bang the cab in front of us. We’re in a queue of cabs jostling for position in front of the train station. And suddenly it’s a mob scene even worse than two months ago, because after all the Chinese population has continued to grow in the last sixty days. People are coming in on ancient trains from the countryside who’ve never been to a city in their lives. They are bewildered country bumpkins with stick-out hair who’ve never seen a Caucasian before, certainly not one with a wiry goatee and a panama hat, holding the hand of a twenty-four-year-old Chinese woman, leading her to her track.

“What is your name?” I shout, pulling her along in the crush.

“You know my name.”

“No, your real name.”

She tells me. I have to have her repeat it. “Jinghua.”

“Jinghua,” I say.

“Jeeeeeen, jeeeeen,” she prompts.

I pull my lips back over my front teeth. “Jeeeeeen.”

“Gwuah!”

It’s a throat thing, deep near my tonsils, an uncustomary sound, almost obscene, like kissing the inside of a flower or tonguing a humming-bird. No wonder her teeth are always wet; it’s like soul-kissing in a sun shower. I dig the sound out with my breath and utter it forth, the sound of what she goes by, the sound of who she is. “Jeeeeen-gwah!”

“Give it up!” she shouts.

The peasantry is gawping at us, more than one of them with fingers in their noses, causing the pedestrian jams to thicken. It’s almost time for her train to leave. We shove and wedge until finally we’re at her track.

“I must get something off my chest,” I tell her as we approach her train, steaming there like an old workhorse. “I’m reluctant, but I feel I must.”

She looks frightened.

“I’ve been around the world a few times. I’ve seen a lot of things, but you…”

Our hands are pulled apart as the peasantry intervenes, looking dazed as they shuffle through. This is the ageless, long-suffering substance of the Chinese nation, deeply sunburned, immemorially burnished by the sun as though they’ve been sleeping outside for centuries, in the fields with their crops for millennia. They’ve been rained on by history, they’ve had the elements happen to them for so long that it’s like they’ve become part of the elements, an elementary force of nature. Most of them are pushing one another unthinkingly, but some are stopping in their tracks to stare at the Western man with the Eastern woman who is weeping openly now, groping for each other’s fingers.

“But you,” I resume, “are more beautiful even than a cauliflower.”

The tears gush forth in a spurt of laughter, which she fights to stifle because she has something to tell me in response.

“So may we never use the word ‘love,’ not proper between father and daughter…”

“Okay,” I say.

“But maybe, when I have babies, I tell them I love them. Maybe our generation will be different. May be…”

“Good-bye, daughter I never had.”

“Do not remove my memory from you heart, please.”

“I do not. Never. Never.”

“I miss forever your smart face and pretty sound.”

“Long live the naïveté of the Chinese and American peoples!” I say.

She pushes my shoulder ever so slightly.

I push her shoulder ever so slightly back. Then I push her harder, toward her train.

So in the end I leave China by myself. Instead of Jade seeing me off at the airport, I see her off at the train station, and it feels right that I make my departure alone, the way I arrived. I feel extremely solitary in the back of my cab, driving past Tiananmen Square with the giant portrait of Mao looking more like Larry than Larry ever did, seeming to send me a big inscrutable wink…out past the hutongs where people live, the houses I can’t see into, the whitewashed rooms with harsh sunlight bleaching the threadbare cots and lizards running up and down the walls…or maybe that’s Africa…or maybe that’s everywhere I’ve never heard of…where millions of patients lie waiting with veins ticking for a transplant that will never come. May I have one last rollover prayer, O Sharpest Dresser of them all, King of Coincidence and Singer of Sagas Supreme, that they be tossed a holy bone, too? Reduce the suffering, I pray.

And then I’m at the airport, checking my bag at the sidewalk. In my isolation I fantasize that Dr. X will surprise me by showing up to see me off, in a Bentley overflowing with people I’ve grown attached to: Mary and Cherry, and the Super 2 den mother here to blow kisses goodbye, Artie the KFC deliveryman, some of the waltzing Red Guards. And maybe some of my favorite cabbies will show up, as well: the kidnap cabbie with his dimply wife, the Queen Latifah cabbie weaving her way through the airport traffic honking her horn and shouting “Long, long live!” And maybe Abu on his motor scooter, deciding to take off his mittens and give me a proper handshake good-bye. And others I don’t recognize: a Puerto Rican student now working as a flack for the cruise lines-what’s she doing in my fantasy send-off? Along with others I’ve never seen before: godchildren and colleagues of Larry’s, and a bevy of nuns, including a round one clutching a letter of recommendation, unforged this time. And Jade, dear double agent Jade, coming clean once and for all, swearing loyalty, waving a companion ticket to America to be adopted into my family as the sister my boys never had, or something. Maybe even Larry, a younger version of Larry before he took ill, Larry at his bar mitzvah, the tubby kid who brought me a plate of strawberry shortcake in the parking lot, panting a little because his bow tie was on too tight.

Maybe even this: a bad-bad criminal pleading for his life back in a language I’ll never understand.

But none of this happens, of course. In the end I’m alone as I make my way through the airport, as I shuffle across the tarmac, as I climb the steps into my plane and take my seat and adjust my earphones. But I’m filled with all these people. They’re inside me now, part of the multitude who make up who I am. As the plane lifts itself from the runway, they join me in crossing fingers for the next person who dares come out from under the blankets to take charge of his own destiny, throwing himself upon the good graces of this world, in China or beyond: Good luck, we trick you…