Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read Free Page A

mirror set
into it. ”You can come out now,” he told 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 past winter,- 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
specula-tively:
     
    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