Yes, it’s my people, all right. I feel like Yuh-vonne throwing her arms wide and saying, I love you, Jewish!

I’ve never gone to services in sandals and panama hat before, but what the hell. No one stands on ceremony when you’re on the road. At least I operate as if no one does. If I were going to be self-conscious, I might as well have stayed home.

Izzy is apparently not here yet, but as people trickle in, I mill around making friends among clusters of Western Jews, mostly Americans and English, stationed in Beijing: a short, elegant gent from Baltimore, wearing bow tie and owlish glasses, who turns out to be the dean at this institute; his opera-singer boyfriend, who’s on sabbatical here from the Sorbonne; the Beijing bureau chief for an international news service; plus architects, bankers, and so forth. Everyone is witty, affable, competitive. It’s like old home week except with an edge, the sort of edge cultivated by brainy people who’ve cut their teeth in combative academies, sparring for fun but not entirely for fun. I travel from cluster to cluster, meeting an attractive young New York reporter who sizes me up to see if I’m a threat, and a Chicago judge passing through town who knows my lawyer brother-in-law and says to tell him “no hard feelings,” which I pretend not to hear, deciding it’s the kind of message that will do no one any good. I’m either going to have to tread these shoals very carefully or just shoot the moon.

“A nondenominational service, I take it?” I ask. “Hopefully, not too much responsive reading?”

This line helps me pass muster. The dean with bow tie smiles at me complicatedly.

“Where are you from originally?” I ask a man with the American Foreign Service who wears a black yarmulke with gold Chinese characters.

“I’ve been away so long I’m not from anywhere anymore,” he says-a boast that contains a bit of one-upmanship, I feel. “No one who comes to Beijing now has any idea how it used to be before the reforms,” he adds.

“So true,” I say, meeting his challenge. “When I was here last in ’84, I could never stop and talk to ordinary people in Tiananmen the way I did yesterday.”

“You trying to get yourself thrown in jail?” he pursues belligerently.

Another man in steel wire-rims comes to my defense. “He’d have to try harder than that to get thrown in jail; he’d have to unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ banner or something.”

“Speaking of Tibet, do any of you ever find yourself swayed by the Chinese case for dominion?” I ask.

“I was once shown a three-hundred-year-old document from some Chinese functionary or other,” the man in wire-rims replies, “in which he extended sovereignty over Tibet, but that’s a little like the governor of Texas saying he extends sovereignty over Mexico. Do they have a case?” he asks rhetorically, adjusting his spectacles. “On the basis of various particulars, you could say so, but it doesn’t add up to any compelling narrative.”

“Harvard or Princeton?” I ask him.

He adjusts his wire-rims again, too briskly to be nonchalant. “Harvard,” he admits sheepishly. “What was the telltale sign?”

“The terminology of that last clause,” I say. “The giveaway was the word ‘narrative.’”

“It couldn’t have been Yale?” he asks.

“Certainly not!” I exclaim, using a mock-aghast tone.

A chuckle circles the group. That clinches it. We’re meshpuchah, all but a few holdouts. I feel like Schindler at that banquet early in the movie, working the room so that by the time he left he was a pal of all the bigwigs. But I’m still wondering how to make my move. I decide to go for broke.

“So does anyone happen to have a spare kidney lying around?” I ask.

Expressions of amusement and surprise.

“I beg your pardon?” says the black-and-gold-yarmulke man, who still needs warming up.

“I’m in town scoping out a kidney for my cousin,” I say. “That’s why I’ve been eyeing your midsection somewhat lasciviously, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had noticed,” he says a little icily. “You’re kind of cavalier about this, aren’t you?”

“The riskier the situation, the more cavalier I try to be,” I say. “Keeps me from clutching.”

“Maybe clutching’s not such a bad thing under the circumstances,” he rejoins.

“I don’t know, haven’t you ever heard the ancient Chinese saying ‘When skating on thin ice, flash those blades’?”

“Which dynasty would that be from?” he pursues with tightened lips.

Time for others to step in. “Lighten up, Saul,” says the dean with bow tie. “Just because you have the best-looking yarmulke in the room, that doesn’t give you the right to foist your opinions on everyone.”

But Mr. Black-and-Gold won’t let it go. “Have you even bothered to learn a word of the language?” he asks me.

I smile at him. “This may sound weird, but I always try not to learn the language of the countries I visit,” I say. “I find I can pick up more sensory information without it, like how a blind person develops other skills to compensate. Have to stay more alert to signals from my environment without the crutch of language.”

The others rally to my defense. “Why are you on his case, Saul?”

“I’m just against checkbook medical tourism,” he declaims flatly. “There are two million people waiting for organs in China. It’s repugnant for cowboys to come in and try to jump ahead of them.”

“I’ll meet your statistic and raise you one,” I say. “How’s this: Seventeen Americans die each day waiting for an organ of one sort or another.”

“I’ll leave the American medical community to voice my position,” he counters. “I’m sure they have good reasons for loathing the practice.”

“Yet even for them it’s not cut and dried,” I say. “I’ll tell you what my cousin’s nurses said. When my cousin was still undecided about going abroad, they agreed with the doctors, that he should sit still and be patient. But when my cousin’s mind was made up to go, they all said, ‘Good for you.’”

“Hmmph!” says Black-and-Gold, half protest and half something else.

“All I’m saying is that under ordinary circumstances I might be tempted to be dogmatic, too,” I tell the man. “But when it’s your own relative’s life on the line, you tend to see a few more shades of gray.”

By now the others are nodding so much on my behalf that Black-and-Gold is finally forced to cut me some slack. “Well, in that case you might want to talk to Antonia over there,” he says. “She owns SER Global.”

“What’s SER Global?”

“Only the principal manufacturer of surgical instruments in the world.”

She’s the glamorous Aussie who said “You had your baby!” when I walked in. She’s taking her seat in the front row beside the news bureau chief, who turns out to be her brother. Good, he’s already in my posse. But I have to plot my approach judiciously. If I approach her directly, it’ll be a one-shot deal and she’ll either cooperate or not. But if I give her room to approach me, I lose nothing if she doesn’t and still retain the option of pursuing her privately later if need be. Sound like a plan? But how am I going to pull it off?

The service begins. I take my seat dead center, and a guy who looks like he could be named Izzy enters the room to take a seat behind me. We give each other the thumbs-up. It’s an energetic ceremony, full of the bellowing of songs and waving of arms to welcome in the Sabbath. The tunes are ones a child might make up in a playground by himself: simple and flowing. The rabbi is an enthusiastic twenty-something woman in Birkenstocks, cracking wise. I find myself thinking that she’s an example of someone who should be a little less comfortable with public speaking, but then decide that’s an uncharitable thought, the result of my being the product of a combative academy myself.

I relax and let my mind wander. Why do I find myself so comfortable in this setting? Maybe it’s because for the better part of a week I’ve been charmed by the Chinese, who seem not so dissimilar to Jews. Think of the areas both specialize in: education, business, and family-not necessarily in that order. Also food. Don’t Jews repair to Chinese restaurants on Christmas, when they’re in need of emotional comfort? Haven’t I noticed that the traditional Chinese moon-cake pastry comes in flavors like those of hamantaschen? Also both subsets have been victims of the same prejudice through the ages: that they’re gawky, bumbling, industrious-the nerds of their respective continents, who in reality have proved themselves capable of some of the most nerdless feats on earth. Also they both share some basic ideas of life and death, such as the belief that the physical body should stay intact after death, barring the removal of organs. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t bode well for my getting a kidney.