Grace straightened up, and motioned for Nate to try it. He put his hands on the floor and copied the pose as she had done it. Grace noted with satisfaction that Nate’s form was very good, and that he was strong. She was pleased that he had done it well.
This first contact had gone well. Grace was friendly and modest, and she’d responded to Nate playing the informal, friendly American. She wasn’t so tight-assed shy that she didn’t demonstrate a yoga pose in a short skirt. Now comes the second meeting, thought Nate, a critical contact in any developmental, when the target decides whether the relationship continues. Embroidered stocking tops and pink-grapefruit lips aside, Nate hoped it would.
Three days later Nate invited Grace to dinner. She knew Hong Kong and suggested they go to the China Club, a chic restaurant done in colonial Shanghai style with red walls and Chinese screens, an ornate carpeted staircase to the dining room, and funky framed daguerreotypes of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao on the walls, a tongue-in-cheek retro pantheon of the crew who plunged the world into flames. The club was on the top three floors of the old Bank of China Building—the first postwar skyscraper in then-British Hong Kong with a 1950s vintage lobby of polished marble columns and terrazzo floors—on Des Voeux Road in Central. Grace suggested Nate try the Ma Po eggplant in garlic sauce, a specialty. Fragrant, spicy, glistening; it was delicious, Nate told her.
Grace had two glasses of wine at dinner, and coyly told him her Chinese name was Zhen, which means precious and rare. She wore a simple black dress, a double strand of pearls, and tiny pearl earrings. Her perfume was exotic and smoky; Nate had never smelled anything like it, and it lingered in his nose and mouth. She giggled when Nate threw her a bone, joking about growing up in a family of rapacious Southern lawyers, priming the pump to get her to start talking about herself. Her history came out haltingly. She was an orphan whose liberal-minded parents—one a professor, the other an artist—were imprisoned during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983, the year she was born. She was remanded to a reluctant government-assigned foster family who received a stipend for taking the baby girl. She never saw her real parents again. She endured an unhappy adolescence, spent a lonely four years in a British university, and returned to a cynical, smog-choked China of new millionaires and a censored Internet—an emergent superpower paradoxically caught in its imperial past. With an uncertain future, Grace went to hotel school, then moved to Hong Kong and prospered, eventually becoming assistant general manager at the Peninsula.
“How is it you went to university in Britain?” asked Nate. Grace lowered her eyes and sipped her wine.
“I received a scholarship,” she said, vaguely. Huh. Not usual, Nate thought, unless you have a patron who pays. Or unless the State pays for you. There’s a slightly false note here. Circle around and ask her later.
“And the yoga?” asked Nate. Grace leaned forward, no longer defensive.
Searching for comfort and company in a rootless childhood, twelve-year-old Zhen spent hours in the back room of the neighborhood Zhōngyī shop that sold traditional Chinese medicines. The nut-brown old woman who swept the floor was a Bengali Indian, improbably stranded in China after a shipwreck, who whispered to the young girl, became her Jiàomǔ, her godmother, and sang the ancient Sanskrit Vedic mantra, the Gayrati, to her. The old crone was a yogini, a guru of the ancient practice, and began teaching Grace poses on the rough coir mats in the fragrant back room lined with amber jars of preserved coiled snakes, yellow flasks of bear bile, and gray dried lingzhī mushrooms, stacked on shelves like cordwood. Besides its physical benefits, Grace, in time, discovered the abiding spirituality of yoga. It gave her serenity and made her melancholy adolescence bearable. She never stopped studying yoga, not even when she moved to Hong Kong.
“So here I am,” she said, tipping back her wine, accepting a third glass. She brushed a strand of hair off her face, softly bit her lower lip, and blinked at Nate. “No family, fourteen-hour days, nothing but my yoga to keep me whole.” She took another sip of wine. “I don’t know what the future holds.”
