Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read Free Page A

the man who had been listening and observing from the other side.
    The man who walked out to join them looked furious. “Good God,” he said, “you’re sending
her?
I’ve nothing against the woman personally, but if that’s who you’re sending with me into China—”
    “The perfect reaction,” Bishop told him imperturbably. “Do sit down and let us tell you about Mrs. Pollifax—bearing in mind, I hope, that your reactions are exactly the same that we trust China’s security people will experience, too.” …
    Mrs. Pollifax, returning to New Jersey, felt that her cup was running over. It had been startling enough to fly off that morning from Teterboro in a small private plane—how surprised her neighbors would be to know of that!—but this adventure paled now beside the fact that she was actually going to visit China. She was remembering the loving report on China that she’d written in fifth grade, and the triumph of the jacket she’d given it: gold chopstick letters on dark green construction paper. Land of Pearl Buck, too, she thought dreamily—how many times had she seen the film
The Good Earth?
—and of Judge Dee mystery novels, emperors and empresses and palaces and Marco Polo and silk. They all swam together happily in her mind.
    But what felt the most amazing coincidence of all was the class in Chinese art that she’d taken during the pastwinter; it was true that she still had a tendency to confuse the Shang, Zhou, Han, Tang, and Sung dynasties, but the professor had so frequently referred to treasures destroyed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution that she had looked up a great many things about modern China as well, accumulating names like The Long March, The Great Leap Forward, the Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution—which certainly appeared to be anything but kind to culture—and the Lin-Confucius Campaign. Now she was going to see China for herself, which only proved how astonishing life could be.
    She happily overtipped the cab driver, and reaching the seclusion of her apartment tossed coat and hat to the couch, adjusted the curtains to give her geraniums the last of the day’s sunshine, and put water on to boil for tea. Only then did she spread out the brochures and maps and
Hints to Travelers
that Bishop had given her, but it was his page of notes that interested her the most: there was the name Guo Musu to be memorized, and a tourist’s map of Xian cut out of a brochure, with an X penciled in near the Drum Tower—but what, she wondered, did a Chinese barbershop look like?—and there was also a tentative list of the people who would accompany her, subject to change, Bishop had told her. She eyed these speculatively:
    Peter Fox/Connecticut
    Malcolm Styles/New York
    Jennifer A. Lobsen/Indiana
    George Westrum/Texas
    Next she carefully read her travel schedule: New York to San Francisco; San Francisco to Hong Kong; overnight in Hong Kong with instructions to meet the rest of the party the next morning in the hotel’s breakfast room before departure by train for Mainland China. The itinerary: Canton,Xian, Urumchi, Lanzhou, Inner Mongolia, Datong, Taiyuan, Peking; departure from Peking for Tokyo and thence back to New York, arriving four weeks later.
    While her peppermint tea steeped in its china pot she put the notes aside and glanced through the photographs in the brochure, fervently wishing she could pick up the telephone and share her excitement with Cyrus. This was very selfish of her, she admitted, because she knew that he must have been bracing himself for just this occasion. How strange it was, she mused, that Cyrus knew what even her son and her daughter didn’t know: the reasons behind her small travels, the risks she met, and thinking about this she decided that in her next letter to him in Zambia she would not mention China at all; instead she’d write a separate letter that would be waiting for him on his return. This would spare him at least one or two weeks of