Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  ‘Thanks for your help, Sissy.’

  ‘You can’t understand what happy I am to help you, Professor.’

  I set off home. On my way I buy a watermelon in Two Street. Big and unwieldy, it proves awkward to handle with my briefcase. Maddeningly, I find myself stuck behind three tubby women about my own age who block the pavement by walking in a very slow and stately way. Two carry parasols. The third holds a fan over her glossy head to fend off the worst of the sun. I wouldn’t mind a parasol myself. Men never carry parasols, however. Not manly. Okay, outflank the three loitering ladies and duck into One Street. The magazine woman, catching sight of me, bares those almost toothless gums and gives a bony wave.

  ‘How are you?’ she sings out.

  ‘How are you?’ I reply.

  My melon, cut into cool pink watery slices, soon goes into my belly. A few hours after gobbling down the last hunk I feel a pain in my gut. I wonder whether — oops! Quick dash to the bathroom. I spew. A couple of hours later, the squits. Afterwards, I throw myself onto my bed, where I toss and turn. All night, spewing and squitting. Next morning, an item of interest in the news.

  Toxic chemical sprayed on watermelons by farmers to speed up the ripening process …

  Ethephon is the name of the chemical, the story adds helpfully. Sprayed onto fruit crops to accelerate ripening, the chemical can be used safely in a solution of something like one to three hundred. Farmers have been smearing melons with a solution of one to four. A campus doctor looks me over later in the day, just in case my shits should be something serious.

  ‘I agree with your own diagnosis of food poisoning, Dr Morse.’

  ‘Okay, Dr Sun.’

  Dr Sun, by the way, mustn’t be mistaken for my departmental colleague, round-faced, nodding, bobbing Dr Sun. Nor must he be mistaken for Mr Sun, the courteous bookish translator acquaintance who took me along to the turtle banquet.

  ‘Charcoal pills will help,’ says this Dr Sun.

  Autumn starts on a different date every year depending on the phases of the lunar calendar — this year it started early. A hot spell during the season is called an Autumn Tiger. We may well find that the tiger keeps clawing our throats for weeks and weeks yet. I feel so sticky with the heat by the end of my first teaching week that early one evening I set off by bus for the Bund. Maybe some fresh air will be blowing off the Huangpu.

  Once I get there, and fight my way through the crowds onto the embankment along the big grubby brown bend of the river, the last thing that seems on offer is freshness.

  ‘America, Germany, hello,’ says a boy poking a boxful of knockoffs under my nose. ‘You like Rolex?’

  Sweat, rolling down that nose, blots my shirt.

  I flick the kid and begin to trek with the throng along the packed pavement. Who’s out and about tonight on the Bund? Crowds of country folk gawping at the big smoke. Vendors of fizzy pop. A beggar whose fingers have been lopped off. Vendors of greasy snacks. A beggar lacking legs. Vendors of luminous perspex models of the Oriental Pearl Tower. Peasants posing for family pics against the background of the snaking stretch of smelly water, slowly flowing, barge-burdened, brown. On the opposite shore can be seen a cluster of remote and shiny futuristic glass needles, spheres, scalpels, bulbs of sleek towers streaking up into the sky.

  After a while I climb a suspended walkway.

  ‘Hello,’ says a youth. ‘You like boy?’

  Traffic streams under the walkway. On a nearby terrace can be seen a catwalk of red carpet across which white wedding frocks come wobbling. Fantastic yet flimsy, the frocks have been spun from chiffon, tulle, gauze, gossamer. Popping out of the top of the froth are simpering female heads — the heads of models modelling, for this is a fashion parade. A soprano on an electronic soundtrack warbles words from an opera by Mozart. Does anyone on the catwalk know what the sad soprano means by her Italian?

  That’s how they are these days, modern husbands: methodically unfaithful …

  Overhead, hanging from helium balloons tethered by steel hawsers, hangs a red nylon banner advertising skin whitener.

  A bus rattles me back home from the Bund.

  ‘Professor, I am Jay in class three,’ says an email that pops into my inbox first thing next day. ‘I happen yesterday to see u in the Bund.’

  I can feel a smile lift the corners of my mouth. All week I’ve been struck by how my best students seem to see me as more than simply some outsider paid by the university to give classes. They seem to think that they and I are going to get to know each other. Odd, when you come from my kind of country, where a teacher would be the last one on the planet a student would want to get matey with. Working my way through the rest of the email, I find myself thinking fitfully about what it would be like to be not just a teacher but the father of a frank, quick lad like Jay.

  ‘Actually, the crowd below catch my eyes. So I stop to watch. And suddenly I find that u r in the crowd and are watching and looking very thoughtful. I don’t want across to say hello to u. I don’t want to disturb ur thoughts. Now I am suggesting my friends to play a game of basketball. I very love basketball! Wish u enjoy weekend! Urs truly, Jay.’

  A second smile now spreads itself all the way up into my eyes.

  Okay, breakfast.

  Toast and grapefruit and hot coffee. After breakfast, a workout at the gym. After gym, lunch with some colleagues. After lunch, lolling about with a novel. After lolling, dinner with some more colleagues. After dinner, at ten in the evening, I get ready for clubbing. I take a shower. I slip into linen flares. I drop a tanktop over my head. I flag down a cab. I head across town to Jimmy’s Bar.

  ‘Wow, so sexy!’ says Jimmy.

  Jimmy is a chunky, lying spunk of about forty, who comes from one of the provinces and always does his best to make you feel welcome by laying on the flattery.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ I say with a wink.

  ‘Hehe,’ says Jimmy.

  The bar looks like hundreds of your classic dark cellar-like spaces found all around the world, though in fact it’s not a cellar. Simply step off the pavement of an avenue and there you are, the bar. Already I feel as though I know it from top to bottom, though this is only my third visit. A marble statue of a scholar from late imperial days — one palm lifted up stiffly, the other dropped down stiffly, in the traditional gesture of learning — stands on a plinth behind Jimmy. Otherwise the look is low-key techno. Tiny white spotlights cast small pools of light. A red glow comes from the bar. A group of lesbians drink and smoke on stools. Two wear the international dyke uniform of cropped hair and baggy trousers, while the others look like nicely brought-up young ladies of the city. Clients otherwise are all guys. A few foreigners, like me, but mostly locals. The waiters are babes. They wear black jackets with red piping. One sports a red mohawk.

  I sit at the bar and buy a beer.

  A young guy opposite, wearing a white baseball cap and a white T, glances at me then looks away. Cute, but too young.

  He looks back. He smiles at me tentatively.

  We glug at our beers. He looks away.

  He looks back.

  Ben is his name, it turns out. He’s a junior lecturer in architecture at another university. He tells me it’s his first time in a gay bar. We speak in English.

  ‘I think I’m no fool, man,’ he says. ‘But ego aside, I’m pretty joe average, I guess.’

  ‘Oh, okay, sounds cool. Tell me more?’

  ‘Sure. Things I don’t do are drugs, smoke, rave, backstab, one-night stands. Things I do are classical music, fine wine and food, art, romance. I’m a cinema buff, too. I’m not into just hanging out being silly. Or going out partying. I don’t rate myself as wrapped up in all the problems in life. I focus on the good things that are all around us. I totally like a good conversation. I totally like doing chilling-out type of stuff. I like to be random sometimes, but most of the time I’m methodical. I’m not insane. I’m not obscure. I’m not fake. Enough said. So, yeah, that’s me. Good to meet you, man!�
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  ‘Where did you learn to speak English so fluently? Have you spent time living in another country?’

  He smiles, strokes a button nose, then shakes his head.

  ‘Dude, this guy’s never even been outta Shanghai, hardly, let alone to another country. It’s just I like to chill in chatrooms, right? I cyber all these chicks and guys around the world. I’m online heaps of time. I was online tonight, too, but then I told myself, come on, don’t cheat on yourself, go downtown, go to a bar, you need to meet somebody.’

  He looks away, and once more strokes that nice little nose, this time more nervously. My heart’s given a bit of a bump. Maybe he’s someone I could get close to. I want to be close to somebody. I want to hold somebody. I feel lonely. I’ve always felt lonely. I’ve always felt afraid of being lonely. I’ve always felt afraid, at the same time, of being close to somebody.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, a bit more breathily than I’d like, but somehow my heart’s now in my mouth. ‘I’m somebody.’

  He looks at me, then looks away, then looks back.

  ‘Have the wax strips come yet?’ asks Chatwoman.

  ‘What wax strips?’

  My sis and I are seated once more over coffees, and in her case cake, in one of the windows of Dante. Carmen looks today like a big shiny apple. She’s wearing a linen trouser suit with loose legs and a looser jacket, the whole outfit dyed the bright russet hue of the fruit when it’s ripe — or maybe overripe. Her big round face glows with sweat. The hairdressing salon has turned her lately into a redhead.

  ‘I emailed my beautician asking her to make up a pack of wax strips and send it to you. My beautician back home, I mean. Tiffany. She’s got piercings in the webbing of her fingers. Not a common look, and not necessarily a good look, but she knows how to buff and polish yours truly. Where the hell are those wax strips?

  ‘Well, you know China Post.’

  ‘True, but Tif told me she posted them to you ten days ago. How are you, apart from hirsute?’

  ‘Box of birds. Ben seems sweet. How about you?’

  ‘Box of birds also, though blokeless. Cyberdating is proving to be a mixed bag. I went on a date with a guy last night. A local guy. Angsted away about him for the whole day because he’d sent me his pic by email and I’d made up my mind he was out of my league. Also I worried about what to wear when I found out he works for Hugo Boss.Met him and found him to be uglier, shorter and a lot less cheerful than a garden gnome. Consequently cut the meeting short and sloped off morosely to a takeaway joint with goal, achieved, of chowing down on cheap Thai.’

  ‘Didn’t know there was such a thing as cheap Thai in Shanghai.’

  ‘Well, thinking it through, there isn’t — not for poor saps on a lecturer’s salary.’

  Cooler weather has come at last. We’re all smiling and wishing each other joy for the fact that temperatures are now almost always lower than thirty. The woman who lay under a damp cloth on her deckchair like a boned joint of meat my first night in town can now be seen sitting up alertly, her bones all miraculously reinserted into her body, her sharp little eyes taking a good squint at the neighbours.

  ‘How was school this morning?’ I ask Ben.

  ‘Boring as usual, man,’ he says. ‘Can we don’t talk about that?’

  We’re on the phone, and while we swap words I twist myself to look at my back in a mirror. Hairier than ever.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Have your lunch yet, dude?’

  ‘I grabbed a banana. How about you?’

  I don’t give a flying fart about food, nor do I give half a flying fart about how anyone else has been foddered, but in this town grub is spoken about as earnestly, with all its ins and outs, as real estate and jobs and money. Ben might talk like what he thinks is a groovy guy, and might think that he understands what he likes to call fine wine and food, but already I’ve found that nothing makes his eyes sparkle more brightly than quick fingerwork with a pair of chopsticks and a table groaning with local mainstays like thousand-year-old eggs and smelly tofu and sticky meatballs.

  ‘Lunch with colleagues. One of them, my co-teacher, got promoted to be an assistant professor, so she invited us to eat.’

  Yawn.

  ‘Was that fun?’

  ‘Yeah, man! We found a nice mutton hotpot restaurant. Totally nice, their mutton is famous.’

  ‘Cool. What time do we meet at Shimen Lu?’

  A time is settled. We say goodbye. We’ve been seeing each other a lot since that first night at Jimmy’s. Walking away from the mirror, willing myself not to think about my shaggy back, I make myself think instead about Ben. I feel guilty going with a guy who’s so young. He’s twenty-five years old — same age as my oldest daughter! Going with a guy in his twenties is sick and pervy. Yet — well, I love the way he looks. I love the delicacy of his skin when we strip off. As for him, he doesn’t seem to mind that I’m twice his age. He said the other day he thinks I’ll look even better when I’m older! How can he say that about some old grizzly who’s got so many tough little tufts sprouting where they’re not meant to sprout?

  Where’s that wax?

  Yesterday I sent him a text saying I was gagging for our next fuck. He sent me back a text telling me not to talk about such things on the cellphone

  ‘Dude, we r in China,’ he said at the end of the text.

  The authorities have been carrying out random checks on texting for a while and new, tighter monitoring was imposed just the other day. Police software can seek out key words. The state claims to be doing it to crack down on sexual immorality. Ben can be forgiven for feeling fidgety. His university jumps on any of its staff known to be — or thought to be — queer. Several lecturers there have been whispered about, then sacked, under the pretext of psychological unfitness for the work. All were good teachers. What gets to me most about the whole matter is that Ben doesn’t frown on what the university and the state do to such guys. He thinks a scholar must behave with propriety. Funky cybering online is one thing. A correct career is another thing. Ben’s father is an official in the Party. His mother is a lady.

  Just now on the phone, puzzled by the knowledge that we’re to be meeting his sister, I asked him a question I’d not got around to asking before today.

  ‘Your sister knows all about you, does she?’

  ‘Are you crazy? Of course not, man!

  One last tweak to my clothes and I’m out the door and off to the skytrain.

  Fireworks are fizzing and popping in One Street. We’re about to begin National Week, when we celebrate the liberation of the motherland by the Party. Not many people believe in the Party any more, needless to say, but everyone believes in a week’s holiday. Fireworks have been going off at odd intervals for days now. Explosive bangs rather than pretty sparkles. Also the normal noises of our neighbourhood — sirens, traffic, women calling out to each other — and the terrified squalling of a cat somewhere, sounding as though it’s giving birth to kittens every time someone lets off another string of crackers.

  Ben meets me at the metro stop and walks me to a teahouse nearby. He wears jeans and a military green T on which are printed some white words in English.

  I depart with full of time.

  I control time,

  but it’s also me who

  is run by time.

  Yes, well. We come upon three wizened little dark men with bad teeth, in cheap shiny black suits, yarning cheerfully. We swing around them and almost walk into a young man. Wiry, wary, he’s trundling behind him a cheap suitcase on its two little plastic wheels. A peasant of some sort, come to work in the city. He looks at me narrowly as I skirt him and his stuff. Foreigner, he’s thinking. I wonder whether he’ll float or go under. So many go under.

  Not that you’d know from the look of the teahouse. A brick mansion, spiky with terracotta turrets, it was built during the twenties of last century by some rich official or merchant or gang boss.

  ‘We can eat here, right?’ I ask after we’ve bee
n settled at a table. ‘It’s not just tea?’

  ‘Dude, they only do a few dishes. They’re, like, totally expensive.’

  We’re parked on top of hard seats of wrought iron, meant to look Italian. Not only are we parked, we’re writhing. The seats of the chairs are naked metal but for one small brocaded cushion which you try to stick into the small of your back. You try, yet it keeps floating away. You’re poked and prodded by the knobbiest knobs of the ironwork.

  ‘Oh, okay, so you don’t want to eat? Just drink?’

  ‘Yeah, man. We come here to drink the tea. They do the tea real cool.’

  A slight young woman, having minced towards us, drops herself into one of our chairs.

  ‘My sister,’ says Ben.

  ‘I am Aeolus,’ she says.

  Aeolus is a word that has to be spoken twice, and afterwards spelled out slowly letter by letter, before I’ve grasped what it is, this supposedly English forename. China seems to be thronged with well-schooled young women whose English teachers have given them, or who’ve taken on themselves, all kinds of weird and wonderful names of goddesses and half-goddesses and sprites and nymphs from the old folk worlds of Latin and Greek. Why don’t they take the names of goddesses from the old folk world of English? That’s what I wondered when I first got to this town. Why do I keep meeting a Danae here and a Chloe there, yet nary a Freya? Why no Frigga? Why are some boys called Hercules but none Woden? Well, they’re taught that the father of English is Latin. Those are the words. The father, as though words were flesh, as though words were born into the world saddled with a full weight of filial duty like good Confucian kids told to kowtow to their elders and betters. Blow that for a joke. One father’s quite enough, thanks.

  Anyway, what’s she like, this lass with the nonsensical name?

  She is demure, correct. She wears a ribbed green halter and a pair of specs with thick black rims. Her long hair, tied behind, has been delicately highlighted with copper. She wears no makeup but has plucked her eyebrows down to a fine line and then marked them with black. She works in publicity. She drives an Alfa Romeo. I’ve heard all about it from her brother, who covets the car and calls it her wheels. She can’t possibly have bought it on her own salary. Nor could her father have bought it for her on his salary.