WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE: THE THIRD SPACE
FINDING CHINA
BY MAGGIE SHELTON
The hotel lobby did not promise much with its cracked walls, peeling counters
and overflowing ashtrays.
‘Lunch at twelve o’clock. Shuttle for airport, six o’clock. Room 610. You stay
with that woman.’ The clerk pointed to a very old Chinese woman, standing
alone amongst the milling travelers in the lobby.
I had seen her on the bus from the airport and wondered what was she doing,
on her own, making this long trip through Shanghai to Los Angeles. Now I
considered her again, this tiny, frail woman clutching her room key and
hunched over her small carry-on.
‘Christ,’ I hissed through my teeth, and narrowed my eyes at this added
unpleasantness after the fourteen-hour delay.
The elevator was sketchy at best. It lurched from floor to floor groaning and
shuddering, reluctant to open its steely doors but not hesitating to snap them
shut with an alarming speed. I held firmly to the bird hand of the woman, and
at the sixth floor I bulldozed our way through the tightly packed bodies, pulling
the woman with one hand and holding our two carry-ons with the other. Curses
followed me, but I didn’t care, determined to get out before the doors crushed
the both of us.
In the room, I discovered the woman knew a smattering of English, enough to
tell me that she was ninety-one, lived with her daughter in Los Angeles, and
had traveled back to China one last time to visit family before she died.
She lay down and immediately fell asleep. I removed her shoes and tucked her
purse close in beside her, then covered her with a blanket. It was only mid-
morning, and I was hungry, so I left, using the trash-filled stairwell to descend
the six floors.
Outside, I bought an apple, two bananas and a soft apricot to share with my
roommate, and a lemon to freshen the stale odor of our room.
I’d arrived in Chongqing two months before to visit my son and daughter-in-law
only to watch my son being arrested for an expired visa and taken off to prison.
I’d spent the first month plaguing the American Consulate and demanding help
until negotiations had reduced his sentence of six months to three. The second
month I’d taxied to the slums of the city where the ancient prison stood,
walking through human waste and past underfed children to stand in line for
hours, just to deliver his weekly food and cigarette allowance. All romantic
thoughts I’d had for China had swirled down the drain with the rest of the
sewage.
The noisy and crowded streets of Shanghai differed little from Chongqing, and
nothing caught my attention until I spotted a soot-stained, scalloped wall
topped with fancy iron-work. Maybe enclosing a park, or a public garden, I
hoped.
My momentary surge of excitement dampened the moment I stepped into the
park. Viewed through the mold-covered gates from the sidewalk, I thought I
might finally have come upon the real China I’d set out to find. Something with
a small arching bridge, graceful, sweeping willows, and the trill of a bluebird in
17 | MAY 2017