China Bride

ONE

You don’t know what kind of men these are.

They might also decide to rape you.

1

BETH WORKED HER HANDS and wrists against the rough, tight rope that lashed her wrists behind her back. She felt tingling in her hands and felt them becoming cold. She struggled. The rope burned her skin as she slipped it back and forth, straining to loosen it, even if only a little bit. She could move it. Gradually she was able to move it more, then still more, as it grudgingly loosened. Maybe … Oh, God help her, maybe!

She lay on a blanket in the rear of a van that worked its way down a steep hill and through narrow streets clogged with traffic. She heard horns honking and the driver cursing. When he slammed on the brakes, she was thrown forward. When he made a quick turn, she was tossed. Her hips and shoulders were bruised.

She was bound, blindfolded, and gagged, but almost no gag could prevent a person from mumbling understandable words—all you couldn’t do was scream—so she could mutter to Michael, Ai rien, she said. It meant darling and was one of the few Chinese expressions she had learned. Are you okay?

Michael, too, was blindfolded, gagged, and bound—perhaps more tightly than she was. I … suppose, he mumbled.

At last the van stopped. Two men pulled the doors open, and the smell of dirty seawater rushed in with the fresh air. The men spoke Chinese, and Michael forced words past his gag: We’ve got to sit up. We’re going aboard a boat.

Beth twisted her body and rose to a sitting position. One of the men grabbed her by the arms and pulled her out of the van. He used a knife to cut off her blindfold, so she could see where she was walking, then he led her down a flight of stone stairs and across a stone wharf. The boat was rising and falling, and she was not sure how she would cross the gap from wharf to deck. That problem was solved for her. A man behind her gave her a hard shove. She grunted in panic, but the shove was so hard that she fell across the dangerous gap and into the arms of another man.

The boat was an open launch, some thirty feet long. The kidnappers pushed the pair toward the stern and shoved them down on a cushioned bench on the left side. She heard the engines roar to life—three of them, she guessed, meaning that this was a fast, powerful boat. The men pulled the mooring lines aboard, and the boat eased away into choppy water.

Beth stared at Michael and saw that he was staring at her. She was reassured to see that he was unmarked and cognitive, for she had thought she heard someone hit him just after she was blindfolded. Light reflected off the water struck his eyes, and she saw love as she had long seen love there—plus now, agony and sadness. She tried to show him love with her eyes.

I love you, Michael, she muttered through her gag.

The magnificent Hong Kong waterfront was behind them as the launch moved out into a busy harbor. Beth was from Boston and had seen the New York waterfront besides, but no city in the world—at least none that she had seen—was anywhere near as impressive as this. Just behind the docks a hundred or more high-rise buildings rose into the night sky.

She turned her attention back to the rope that bound her hands. Her skin was raw now and stung as she rubbed the cord on one wrist against the cord on the other. She was probably bleeding, but it began to seem possible that she could work one or the other of those lengths of rope over one of her thumbs and slip loose.

She glanced around to see if the kidnappers were watching closely or if they were near enough to hear what she was going to say—assuming any of them could understand English, which none of them had spoken so far.

Michael, she whispered. I think I can get loose.

If you can, do it fast. You don’t have much time.

2

SHE AND MICHAEL HAD met on Harvard Yard. As a student at Boston University, Beth had had access to the main Harvard library and had come to borrow three books she needed for her senior paper on American transcendentalism. She had been hurrying to catch a bus. Michael was a graduate student, one year from his MBA, and had been hurrying toward his car, thinking of an expiring parking meter. As they rushed across the Yard they had accidentally collided, she staggered and nearly fell, and the three books she was carrying fell to the ground.

"Oh! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! Please … Please let me help you."

He squatted to gather up her books. She knelt beside him to receive the books as he picked them off the ground.

It was as much my fault as yours, she said, focusing her attention on the embarrassed young man. He was handsome, roughly her own height, well put-together and well dressed. He was of Chinese or Japanese descent.

Uh … I … Miss … Am I wrong, or are you Mary Elizabeth Connor? I mean Beth Connor of the Barcelona Olympics.

She smiled faintly, not entirely pleased to be identified. Yes. I am Beth Connor.

It is a pleasure to meet you, he said.

Well, I suppose it is a pleasure to meet you, Mr.…?

Chang. My name is Michael Chang.

They stood, and Beth smiled. I guess you’re not Irish.

No. No, no, said Michael Chang. I am Chinese, from Hong Kong. I have been in the States for five years—studying.

Hong Kong. I’ve met several Chinese people but don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Hong Kong. From all I hear, it’s a very interesting place—a world unto itself—and I hope someday to see it. But isn’t Hong Kong being returned by the Brits to China?

Not until July first, 1997, two years from now. I’d enjoy telling you more about it. Would it offend you if I ask you to join me for a beer, Miss Connor? Buying you a beer is the least I can do for—

It doesn’t offend me at all, but—

Of course. I understand. It is abrupt of me to invite you for a beer, when we have just met. I am sorry.

Beth was touched. He was so genuinely apologetic that she feared she would really hurt his feelings if she refused to have a beer with him. And he was so deferential and courteous that she could not believe he was just trying to hit on her.

Well, I’ll tell you, she said. I’ll join you for a beer if you will call me Beth, Michael.

He smiled. Yes. Of course. And thank you.

As they walked out of the Yard and across the street to a student bierstube, she caught herself glancing sideways at him and rather liking what she saw.

You are an exceptionally beautiful girl, Beth, he remarked ingenuously as they walked. Am I too direct?

Yes, she said, letting him see a smile.

Even so, I think you are beautiful.

I might be if I were not so … big, she said. My father calls me ‘a strapping big girl.’

I’m not sure exactly what that means, he said soberly. Anyway … I am very glad to have met you, even if it had to be in so awkward a way.

Beth was twenty-two years old, a tall blond sometimes called not just strapping but husky. She was a full-figured woman with generous breasts, a visible though not protruding belly, and a well-defined tush. None of her was loose or soft. To the contrary, she was athletic: she had competed as a runner in the Olympics three years ago—having failed to achieve her real ambition, which was to compete as a swimmer—and her body was sinuous and firm. She still swam, though, and she had given up competitive running. That autumn day she was wearing a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a black miniskirt that exposed her muscular legs.

In the bierstube they found a booth and sat down opposite each other. The rugged, old wooden table was scarred with cigarette burns and deep scratches that had been darkened with ballpoint pens. Although they had a degree of privacy in the high-backed booth, they were noticed by some of the others at the bar, two or three of whom nodded a greeting.

You are known all over the world, Michael said.

"I think one of them at least was saying hello to you."

Ah … Well, perhaps. I have been at Harvard five years and have made a few friends. But you—everyone knows the name Beth Connor.

I could wish not so many did, Michael, she said regretfully.

It was an accident, he asserted firmly. "I am Chinese, and I didn’t think you did anything wrong."

The guileless sincerity of his statement caught her. Well … many thought I did. She smiled wryly. After all, most of the Chinese think I did something wrong, and there are a lot more Chinese than there are Americans.

Michael shrugged. The Chinese support and admire their athletes the same way Americans do, the same way the Brits do. When you and Xiang Li collided and she fell, many Chinese were immensely disappointed. They had expected her to win a gold medal.

They didn’t have to accuse me of knocking her down intentionally, Beth said tartly. They didn’t need to accuse our coaches of putting me—‘a gawky, muscle-bound amazon’—on the two-thousand-meter for the very purpose of knocking down Xiang Li.

Only the New China News Agency XinHua said that. I don’t think anyone much believed it, even in China.

I had a good chance of winning a medal myself, you know, said Beth. Maybe not the gold. But I was knocked off stride and came in ninth. Then the New China News Agency launched a propaganda campaign against me. I resented it, Michael.

Michael smiled widely. You had every right to. But, you had your say, didn’t you? What was it you said on NBC, that athletes from a ‘murderous dictatorship’ like China should not be allowed to compete in the Olympics at all? ‘The butchers of Beijing,’ I believe you called them.

She shook her head. You know something, Michael? My name and face became more widely known than those of anyone who won a medal at Barcelona. When I came home to Boston—to Southie specifically, where the Irish live—I was more of a heroine than if I had won five golds. I was nineteen years old, and I was the girl who’d called the dirty Commies ‘dirty Commies.’ It’s not a very good kind of heroine to be.

As they talked, Beth was studying Michael Chang. He was wearing a gray tweed cashmere jacket that she recognized as expensive, a white shirt, rep tie, and charcoal-gray slacks, plus Gucci loafers. Except for his almond eyes and brush-cut black hair, he looked like an American preppie from a moneyed family. His complexion was smooth and satiny, not shiny as were the complexions of some Chinese she had seen, and it was by no means yellow. She had heard that some Orientals called Westerners long-noses. If so, Michael was a long-nose; his nose was not flat but well-defined and sharp.

So, you’ve been in the States five years, she said.

Yes. I was educated at a Jesuit preparatory school in Hong Kong, then came to Harvard.

Does that mean you are Catholic? she asked.

He chuckled. I was baptized. But the Chinese are not a religious people, Beth. We are superstitious but not religious. My parents wanted to send me to this fine Jesuit prep school. On the application form, under the column ‘Religion’ my father put down, ‘Willing to be Catholic,’ meaning the whole family would convert to Catholicism if that would land me in that fine school.

Beth smiled. Sounds like a variation of what we used to call rice Christians. Did your parents have to be baptized for you to get into that school?

No. The Jesuit fathers won’t accept that kind of fake devotion. I got one of the eighty places by merit, beating out two thousand other applicants in a nine-hour examination. She heard in his voice his pride in this achievement.

But you eventually volunteered for baptism, didn’t you?

I admired the Jesuits, their dedication. They were from Ireland and taught me to despise the British colonial administration who believed Her Majesty’s servants were one cut above the Chinese, and the Irish for that matter. My faith weakened after I came to America. Now I am a non-churchgoing agnostic.

Beth laughed. That describes me, too, she said.

Surely, as an Irish—

No.

Would it offend you if I invite you to dinner one night this week?

She had been anticipating some such invitation. She was accustomed to receiving them. She attracted young men, not just by her comely face and sensual figure but by her enduring notoriety. Young men who dated her expected it to be noticed that they had gone out with Beth Connor. Almost invariably, they had other expectations as well. She wondered why Michael Chang wanted to take her to dinner, what expectations he had. She asked him—

Why do you want to take me to dinner, Michael?

As she was to observe many more times, he was all but obsessively literal and actually obsessively sincere. He did not lay on his answer the ironic tone an American would have used for self-protection, to suggest that if she declined his invitation he could pretend he had not meant the invitation to be taken seriously anyway. He said—

Because I think you are exquisitely beautiful, supremely intelligent, and boundlessly interesting.

She smiled warmly and shook her head. "Michael … after hearing you say that, how could I possibly say no?"

He grinned playfully. I was hoping you couldn’t.

They went to dinner the next evening.

He took her to the Chinese restaurant high in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The hostess asked if he had a reservation, at which point the maitre d’ rushed up and said, "You don’t ask Mr. Chang if he has a reservation. Just seat him and his guest." In fact, the maitre d’ himself seated them, on a banquette on a curved riser, where they had a view of the Charles River and the city.

Michael suggested to Beth that she might like Scotch for her before-dinner drink. She nodded, and the maitre d’ asked, Glenfiddich as usual, Mr. Chang? Michael nodded. Beth took careful note of this interplay between Michael and the maitre d’, also of the deferential welcome their waiter offered.

Beth was glad she had chosen to dress more elegantly than she usually did. She wore a red-orange-yellow-green beaded floral silk chiffon minidress given to her by a Boston department store for which she had modeled it. It was a dress she could not have afforded to buy, and she had worn it only twice before. One of the roommates with whom she shared an apartment near Boston University had suggested this must be an important date, for her to wear the Oleg Cassini dress.

She had almost not worn it. After all, why should she try to impress Michael Chang? She decided, though, that he must be trying to impress her, too. He had picked her up at her apartment, dressed in a handsomely tailored dark-blue suit and driving a silver BMW. Her roommates saw him, and while Beth was in the bedroom picking up her wrap, one of them said, "My God! When you said Chinese, I thought, Poor little fellow. Poor little fellow my achin’ ass! Go for him, Beth! Go, go, go!"

She saw him glancing at her legs as they sat side by side on the banquette facing white linen and heavy silver, and she was glad she had worn a short dress. She thought her breasts were big, and she’d had to defend them against the hands of at least twenty men, but she liked her legs. Dark stockings blurred the image of an athlete’s muscles, and her legs were long and sleek.

So you are Irish, he said, a transparent conversational gambit.

Beth grinned. "It depends on who you ask. When my great-grandfather came to Boston from Ireland in 1911, his name was O’Connor. He dropped two things: the O and his Catholic faith. Some in the family still complain that he left them neither fish nor fowl: micks who couldn’t deny their Irish ancestry but outside the embrace and shelter of the mother church. In Southie the Connors are considered an odd family to this day. My father is proprietor of an Irish pub. He keeps a blackthorn shillelagh on a shelf behind the bar."

What in the world is a shillelagh?

It’s a wicked cudgel, supposedly for bashing the heads of any man who gets drunk and rowdy in the pub. Actually, it’s for show. He’s never used it.

An Irish tradition, I imagine, said Michael solemnly. I’d like to visit your father’s pub.

"I’m not sure you would like it, Michael. The Irish of Southie would very likely tease you unmercifully. They would do it in what they think is a good spirit, but I think you would find it difficult to accept. Most of them are very, very provincial."

My people can be that way. I mean, the Chinese. Also, my family. They are not easy people to understand. Many of us still like to think of ourselves as people of the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe.

One of the things she was beginning to like about Michael was that his sense of humor was gentle and restrained. He did not trade banter. He did not tell jokes; in fact, she doubted he knew any. He was more mature than most young men she knew.

But he was also literal, which was why she suspected he could be hurt by the rough humor the pub regulars would direct at him. She determined to protect him from that, even if he never saw her father’s pub, where one or two evenings a week she perched on the bar for half an hour or so and sang Irish songs while her father played an accompaniment on his concertina.

After they’d had two drinks, he said, I suggest you would like the pressed duck. They do it well here. She listened to him order their dinner and a bottle of vintage Bordeaux suggested by the sommelier.

They had toasted each other with their first sips of Scotch, but now he raised a glass of their second drink and saluted her. I am really grateful that you came tonight, Beth, he said gravely.

It was the sort of thing an American man would never have said. She had never met an American man who would lower his defenses that way. For that was what Michael was doing: abandoning his every defense—with his dignity if she put him aside—and exposing his feelings with honesty that was almost outside her experience. When, tentatively, he laid his hand on hers, she turned her palm up and closed her fingers around his.

He smiled gratefully and innocently.

Beth squeezed his hand. She leaned toward him and kissed him quickly and lightly on the neck.

3

ON THE WEEKEND HE took her to a play on the MIT campus. When, the next week, he asked her for their fourth date—he suggested he would cook dinner for them in his apartment—it left her with a significant decision to make. If she went to his apartment, their relationship would enter a different stage. It was an appealing idea: to be alone with him, perhaps to share with him something more than the calm, dry kisses they had exchanged so far.

On the other hand—

She had read of the Chinese that they were reasoning, purposeful people who identified goals and pursued them. Michael was so American, yet still Chinese. She believed he respected her, but it was also obvious that he was making a rational approach to something meaningful. If she accepted his invitation to visit his apartment, it would signal her willingness to share something more meaningful. If she didn’t, she would have in some sense rejected this kind, thoughtful, warm-spirited man—a man like none other she had ever allowed to kiss her. She said yes.

The building was new, and the apartment was spacious and comfortable. He had a large living/dining room, a kitchen separated from the living room by a counter, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a powder room. He had rented the apartment furnished but had supplemented the rented furnishings with a couch covered in soft tan leather, a glass-topped table covered with magazines and books, and ranks of Barnes & Noble bookshelves. He had bought posters and prints for his walls. She noticed in particular a poster based on a Matisse paper cutting, advertising a Paris exhibit of Matisse work.

Nothing about the place suggested it was the home of a Chinese. He subscribed to many magazines: Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, George, Playboy, and Penthouse. His books were American biographies and histories, and American novels. His tastes seemed to be for everything American.

You can tell something about a person by looking at how they keep their living quarters, she said.

Is the person you see reflected here a person you would allow to kiss you? he asked earnestly and ingenuously. I mean, kiss you not like brother and sister but like— How do I say it?

You don’t have to explain, she whispered. "I know what you mean. You’re the kind of person, Michael. You are the kind of person."

She stepped closer to him, opened her arms to receive him, and moved into his embrace. They kissed gently at first, then fervently, finally so hard that she tasted blood on her lips.

Michael… she whispered.

"You are perfect," he said soberly. Simply perfect.

At this point in any other relationship she’d had, the man began to come on heavy. Michael did not. They sat on his couch, and he kissed her on the neck and ears, on the cheeks, and again on the lips, but he did not offer to touch her legs or breasts.

She had come to the apartment wondering what he would serve. He grilled steaks rare, which he served with buttery mashed potatoes and a Caesar salad. He opened a bottle of red wine. She went into his kitchen while he was cooking and found it was stocked with American foods: steaks and potatoes, frozen peas and corn, frozen pizzas, chicken breasts and thighs with Shake ’n Bake, ice cream, Coca-Cola, and beer. He had no rice, no noodles, no chopsticks.

After dinner he essayed tentative caressing of her breasts. She put her hands on his and pressed his hands down, to make him caress her more firmly. He pulled back her skirt and stroked her legs. She let him. And that was as far as he went. He seemed to marvel that she would let him touch her that intimately. When he kissed her, his kiss was more prolonged and more passionate and involved their tongues.…

4

WHEN HER ROOMMATES BEGAN to make jealous little jokes about Michael, especially about how very wealthy he must be, Beth found herself becoming defensive about him. She saw in Michael a modest, quiet, self-controlled, intelligent man.

He made concessions. He didn’t understand American football and didn’t enjoy the games, but he took her to one game and he sat with her in his living room watching NFL games on television, often asking her to explain what was going on. She found she was comfortable with him. She did not have to fear aggression. He listened respectfully to her opinions and deferentially offered his own, sometimes leading her to change her idea. They discovered mutual interests in films, in art, in food.

After a time he suggested he would prepare a Chinese dinner for her. When she arrived at his apartment that evening she found him busy in the kitchen.

"It must be a sort of American-Chinese dinner, he said. At a real Chinese dinner, many things are served: at least one course of meat, fowl, and fish, with vegetables and soup. All the diners share from all the courses. For us I am making just one course. Pour us two drinks, please."

Beth poured Scotch. She did not ask what he was cooking, just watched while he heated a wok and poured in oil, added a dark paste from a can, then chopped garlic, and then ground pork.

"This is called Ch’ao-lung-hsia," he explained. Lobster Cantonese.

He stir-fried the pork, added soy sauce, salt, sugar, and a chopped scallion. He put in the cut-up meat of a lobster and stir-fried that. Finally he added what looked like chicken stock, a white mixture that probably was corn starch and water, and two beaten eggs.

Cook for a few minutes, he said, putting a lid on the wok.

Michael lifted his glass and saluted Beth. He kissed her, tenderly at first, then more urgently. Because he knew she would allow it—would in fact welcome it—he lifted her skirt and pushed his hand down inside her panties to caress her rear. It was cold, and he rubbed it as if he could warm it.

With the lobster Cantonese he served rice and a mixture of snow peas, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots that he had stir-fried earlier and now reheated in his microwave.

They ate with chopsticks.

When and how did you learn to use chopsticks? he asked her.

I’ve eaten in Chinese restaurants more than a few times.

When you can lift a single peanut from a bowl of peanuts with your chopsticks, then you will be wholly adept with them.

After dinner they experimented with that. Michael did not teach her. He let her struggle. After a few awkward mistakes, losing peanuts on the floor, she mastered the technique.

That night she let him discover her beauty mark: a small dark mole on her right breast, halfway between her armpit and nipple.

It’s a witch mark, she told him, the place where Satan suckles. Oh yes, he suckles me and takes me on midnight rides through all the world. She laughed. The conscious or unconscious wickedness in her laugh almost suggested that she spoke the truth. Three hundred years ago, women were burned alive for having a mark like that.

Michael stared thoughtfully at the little mark and for a very long moment was unsure how to react. Finally he smiled and said, I see. You have three nipples. May I kiss like Satan?

If you are willing to take the risk, she said in a throaty whisper.

Risk?

A man who is seduced by a witch never escapes her.

I do not want to escape you, Beth, he said with that literal sincerity she found so appealing. "You see— I love you."

"Oh, Michael! I love you, too!"

Before they went in the bedroom they agreed he would not take her back to her own apartment, that she would stay with him all night.

5

AND NOW— THE MAN she loved was in agony. He sat bent forward, his arms pinned behind him, his gag distorting his mouth.

She worked desperately on her bonds, feeling her skin tearing away under the rough rope as she worked it toward her hands, suffering pain that