Page 10 of From Beijing, With Love

“Hold on.” Yang leaned in to unbuckle Daniel’s seat belt just as it slammed Daniel back into his seat, his elbow catching Yang’s jaw.

“Oh shit, sorry man,” Daniel said, sounding every bit like the jock cliché in American movies.

“Occupational hazard, so it seems,” Yang said warily.

As Daniel walked through the sliding doors to his glass castle, he turned and gave Yang a final wave, like he knew Yang was still watching.

For whatever reason, that made Yang smile just a little.

The stairs leading up to Yang’s third-floor dorm were a cruel joke on his aching legs. The moment he stepped through the threshold, he collapsed onto his bed. Staring up at the ceiling, Yang thought about Daniel. This was his fourth summer leading these tours. He had the whole thing mapped out—the facts he’d spew, the jokes he’d tell, the photos he’d take. Then Daniel went and turned the tour on its head.

Why was he still thinking about Daniel? The tour was over, and that was that. Yet he couldn’t stop picturing the way Daniel’s eyes lit up when he first took in the grandeur of the Great Wall.

His phone vibrated in his pocket, saving him from having to think about Daniel and how his hazel eyes took on a golden hue in the afternoon light as he awkwardly posed for the photo. Holding the phone above his face, he squinted at the notification—an email from Dr. Sun. Since Yang had just sent his draft out this morning before the tour, he hadn’t expected a reply from his adviser so soon.

Something else he didn’t expect was to see the word disaster in the very first sentence.

This draft is a disaster. Did you bother to review it before you sent it out? Tons of missing information. And where’s the thermal tolerance graph for the cmk-1 strain? It goes without saying that we cannot submit the paper for publication in its current state. Make sure it’s in acceptable shape before you leave for your trip next week.

Yang nearly dropped his phone on his face as he leapt out of bed. At his desk, he watched the logo of the physics department spin on his laptop. His knee bobbed up and down at the same rhythm as his racing heartbeat, willing the site to load faster.

An ominous feeling rose in his chest as he opened the master copy of the paper on the server. Dr. Sun was never wrong, today included.

Apart from the graph that Dr. Sun called out, whole paragraphs were missing. The paper was an incomplete mess, bordering on nonsensical.

Yang knew with absolute certainty that this wasn’t his paper. He prided himself on being meticulous, on controlling every miniscule detail around his academic career. He would have never been so careless as to submit the paper in its current state.

The question then became: What happened?

The document was last modified at 9:05 AM by “Lab Comp 1”—the desktop mounted to Yang’s workstation in the lab. On any other day, Yang wouldn’t have blinked an eye at that. How many hours had he perched on the wobbly wooden stool in front of that computer? But today wasn’t any other day. For one, the lab had been closed for weeks for renovation. For two, at 9:05 AM today, Yang had been in the lobby of Hotel Alium, quietly fuming about a very late Daniel.

Clenching and unclenching his fist, he stared at the document, feeling his temperature rise. For once in his life, he didn’t know what to do.

When his phone shook with an incoming call, he picked it up by habit.

“Yangyang, have you eaten yet?” his dad’s voice rang out. His nickname and that simple phrase in Ba’s Shaanxi-accented Mandarin brought Yang back to earth. He missed that accent; he rarely got to hear it in Beijing.

“Just had dinner,” he lied.

“Good. What time does your train get to Xi’an on Monday? I’ll get your cousin to pick you up from the station.”

“Noon. And don’t bother. I’ll take the transit,” Yang said, knowing there was a fifty-fifty chance that Ba would actually listen. Then something occurred to him. Maybe his dad would know what to do about the paper, given that he was exactly where Yang hoped to be in ten years—a tenured professor running his own lab. “Ba, I need your advice.”

Yang told his dad what happened in his dad’s language—all facts and no emotions. “I don’t know what I should do,” he ended by saying.

“Simple, you fix the mistakes. If you want my advice, I’d say you’ve already wasted too much time thinking instead of doing.” His dad was using his professor voice, the one that made Yang sit up a bit straighter. “You don’t want people to think that you are looking for excuses. You know how small academic circles are …”

Yang knew the next part of the lecture well. Academia was a small world, especially for something as specialized as biophysics. The top research was being done out of a small handful of labs worldwide.

“But how did this even happen?” Yang couldn’t quite let it go.

“It doesn’t matter how,” Ba said with an air of finality. “It only matters that you fix it, and fix it quickly, so you can get the paper out before the fall.”

Yang didn’t need his dad to spell it out. The postdoc selection process was about to start. Dr. Sun was probably already putting together his short list. With one year left in his PhD, Yang needed to plan out his next steps. Getting that coveted postdoctoral fellowship meant having guaranteed funding to do the research he wanted to do, right here at the most prestigious university in the country. After four years at Tsinghua, he wasn’t going to end up at a second-tier university, but the race was competitive. He was one of five PhDs graduating in the next year, not to mention the slew of external applicants.

“Thanks, Ba. You are right. I’ll get right to it,” Yang said with a sigh, then remembered one more thing. “Do you want me to bring anything back from Beijing?”

“Save your money. No one in the family needs anything,” his dad said, like always. Yang made a mental note to stop by the stall on Hua Jie to pick up those lotus pastries his grandma loved.