Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  Aeolus opens conversation by starting to complain about the way too many country folk have come crowding into town for National Week.

  Ben joins the complaining.

  ‘I don’t take shit from anyone, dude,’ he says, turning to me. ‘I tell it how it is, pretty simple. These peasants, they’re dirty and they’re stupid and they’re scum.’

  A waiter begins the tea ceremony.

  Decor in this place seems to be drawn chiefly from some stereotyped concept of southern Europe, yet the clobber for making and drinking the tea is ye olde Middle Kingdom. Little wooden bowls, like embalmed magnolia blooms, are set down on our table by the boy. Sunflower seeds and salted broad beans have been scattered inside each bowl. A little wooden tray, stencilled with the characters for noble tea and topped with a tiny porcelain cup, is given to each of us. The boy takes the cups, warms them by swilling heated water inside, then warms a glazed teapot the same way. Tea leaves are dropped into the pot. Hot water is poured on top. The leaves are steeped briefly. The tea is then thrown away. More leaves are dropped into the pot, and more hot water poured on top of those leaves — this is the tea for drinking. The boy waits briefly. He fills our cups. He pops a sort of porcelain thimble upside down on top, to hold in the bouquet.

  ‘The tea smells great,’ I say, trying to be a good guest and having learnt already that you savour the bouquet from the thimble before sipping the tea. ‘Very smoky.’

  Aeolus, flicking me a cursory smile, sets down her own cup.

  ‘Have many teahouse in your country, bro?’ asks Ben.

  ‘We drink a lot of tea, but not this way.’

  ‘Okay.’

  No follow-up, no asking how we might happen to drink tea in my country, nor any thoughts about the meaning of tea in this country, nor anything at all but a dead stop. The siblings begin slanging each other about the clothes each has chosen to wear, telling the other that he or she doesn’t have any sense of style. Aeolus says her brother is scared of colour. Ben says his sister is too try-hard. Neither shows any sign of wanting to talk about anything other than the petty.

  Well, I’ll give it another go. Stirring myself once more, I do my bit like a good guest.

  ‘Aeolus, how has your day been so far?’

  ‘Boring, stay at the home and watching television,’ she says. ‘That’s all — so boring.’

  Okay, I get the picture.

  ‘What kind of clientele does this place attract?’ I try.

  The sister looks blank. The brother shrugs.

  ‘A cool clientele, dude.’

  Ben is so fond of the sound of his own words that he tends towards the blabbermouth — or maybe it’s better to say motormouth since so much of what comes up from his lovely smooth throat, or down from his comely smooth brow, turns out to be a sort of verbal coolant recycled inside his mind, like the liquid that goes round and round under a car bonnet to stop things from getting too hot. Ben’s brain runs little risk of getting too hot. All the filched funky slang in the world can’t hide the truth that, on close acquaintance, the bloke is as boring as his sister’s day.

  Slackening off my effort at being a good guest I let myself just watch the two of them be brother and sister.

  ‘You looks bad wearing the green,’ says Aeolus. ‘You looks like the dead people.’

  ‘I’m not really into red,’ says Ben.

  ‘You should wear the red.’

  They’re twins. The family is double happy. Twins mean the lawful outflanking of the state policy of only one child for each married couple. Watching the lucky twins while they slang and snap at each other becomes more and more a yawn. I wonder what might go on between the two when they’re not with an outsider. Are they close? Do they tell each other the truth? I doubt it. Aeolus, for one thing, not only hasn’t been told but seems not to have guessed, nor come close to guessing, that her brother sleeps with guys. She seems to assume that because he and I are both academics we must have met at his or my university.

  We tipple at tea. We gnaw at nuts. I offer our young woman a glass of cold water.

  ‘I don’t drink cold water,’ she says. ‘My stomach cannot stand it.’

  Of course. Ben thinks his stomach can’t stand it either.

  ‘I can only handle it in small dosages, dude. It’s just not my thing, I just ain’t into it.’

  After an hour or so a thin lady about my age comes up to our table. A frock, cut from black crepe, drops from her neck to her ankles. Her black hair, thinly streaked with dye the colour of rust, has been drawn back from her cheeks and rammed in place with a lacquer comb. Pearls droop around her collarbones.

  ‘Our mother,’ says Ben.

  ‘So finished?’ says the lady, in English.

  Mother has turned up at the teahouse to ask her daughter to come shopping. Aeolus, not needing to be asked twice, jumps up. Who would’ve thought she could so suddenly come alive? She and her mother lock arms. Slanging in Shanghainese, they head towards the door. Aeolus trips daintily. Mother walks with a sort of swayback strut, in shiny black step-ins with Cuban heels.

  Ben pays the bill, after which we follow.

  We find ourselves wandering through a vast techno space, the atrium of a shopping plaza. Brand names are minimalistically displayed over glowing doorways. Lagerfeld. Chanel. Bvlgari. Versace. A string quintet, tucked into black suits, plays light waltzes by one or other Strauss. Ben and I, while the womenfolk windowshop, talk brokenly about cars, clothes. After a bit we get onto the more meaty topic of the family. Ben tells me that lately the word is that it’s time to find a suitable husband for Aeolus.

  ‘Suitable!’ I say with a bit of a laugh. ‘Who would be suitable, exactly?’

  He looks at me seriously.

  ‘Somebody suitable,’ comes the answer.

  Well, of course I should’ve known not to get saucy. What families of their sort say is men dang hu dui. Stick to your own kind.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Hey, I think I’d better head off home now and do some work.’

  ‘Gotta get your act together for school, right? Call you tonight, man. Okay?’

  Please don’t, I think. Not unless you’ve got something to say.

  ‘Okay.’

  One hour later, turning into One Street, I catch sight of a tall boy. A boy who’s good-looking, who has great big eyes, who’s bounding along blithely and who smiles when he sees me.

  ‘Oh, hardworking professor!’

  ‘Hello, Jay.’

  ‘Are you enjoy the beginning of National Week?’

  ‘Well, it’s really interesting to see the crowds of visitors.’

  The boy grins. We swap a few sentences about our plans for the coming week. I’m staying in town to keep writing lectures. He’s heading back home to Nanjing. Next I ask him how he feels about the way I won’t be setting exams but will be grading my classes on the basis of term work. Not quite grasping my meaning, he thinks I’m asking about the exams he sat before the start of the academic year.

  ‘I already take two public course exams.’

  ‘Public course exams? What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘Modern Chinese. Mao Zedong thought. Deng Xiaoping thought. Hope you know the two fucking leader?’

  He laughs happily, with his whole body.

  ‘The exam in Modern Chinese is just a test of grammar?’

  ‘Yes, very dumb.’

  ‘And the exam in the thoughts of the politicians — it’s just a memory test, right?’

  The boy once more laughs happily.

  ‘Yes, we don’t have to very know their thoughts. Their fucking thoughts.’

  Now it’s my turn to laugh, taken aback by his bluntness.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  We’re standing in front of a knife-grinder on the pavement outside the Sincere Daily Stop. A stringy little man under a dirty straw hat, sitting astride a little wooden trestle on which the grinding wheel spins, he pedals with his right foot. A shopkeeper’s meat knife is being sharpened t
o a shower of sparks.

  The boy — merry, eager, serious — looks straight into my eyes.

  ‘I just think Chinese people they don’t care much about politics. If they can make a living that’s enough. Chinese people are numb. I very enjoy your classes, Professor. All other classes I get sleepy.’

  It’s fun listening to the tumble of his words after the nothingness of the tea party.

  ‘Hah! I get it. Your definition of an enjoyable class is one that doesn’t make you sleepy. I don’t feel too flattered.’

  Not quite following every word I say, the clever lad guesses at the gist, and guesses right.

  He grins quickly.

  ‘You are unique, Professor. Always in other class I get sleepy. Always twenty minutes after the class began I could hardly bear the weight of my eyelids. Or most of the attentions are focused on what to eat after class.’

  ‘How do you like this town, Jay? Do you like living in Shanghai?’

  ‘I love living everywhere, Professor.’

  ‘Good answer!’

  A dazzling smile, during which he jiggles on his feet.

  ‘My main problem is how do I wash my clothes. I think I am helpless with my clothes.’

  ‘What do you mean, helpless?’

  ‘As long as I am living a place far away from my hometown I need to wash my clothes by myself and for myself. I haven’t been thinking until now that a human being will need so much clean clothes a day. In fact, I don’t know the exact standard of clean. Just wash them when one of my six clothes racks are free. Always asking my dormmates how soon should I wash my pants.’

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘They think in the silence for a long time, said that whenever I want. Now I know what the meaning of life. Clean clothes!’

  A parcel comes in the post. Small, light, wrapped in padded white plastic. Ripping it open eagerly, I find inside a kit of twenty narrow cloth strips, each thick with a sticky mix of glucose, fructose, maltose, triethylene glycol, potassium citrate, polybutene —

  Wax, in a word!

  Ben has been understanding about this business of waxing my body. Now, when he hears the news about the parcel from home, he says he’ll come over to help and afterwards stay the night. We fix on a time for him to turn up: nine in the evening. He comes at eleven. He seems tense. He won’t meet my eye. He tells me that when he was crossing downtown by cab all the lights went off briefly in the big buildings. The dark crowded streets, he adds, seemed eerie. We’re speaking English, as always, and he uses that very word. He adds that he felt as though there was going to be a war — that bombs were about to start dropping.

  ‘Really?’ I say, surprised. ‘Who’s the enemy — who would suddenly start dropping bombs?’

  ‘America, of course.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Or maybe Japan.’

  ‘So that’s why you seem a bit upset?’

  ‘No,’ he says very slowly, very unwillingly. ‘No, that’s not why.’

  He looks at the hardwood floor. I make up my mind to say nothing more, at least for now.

  ‘Okay, why not get the wax job out of the way?’

  Stripping off my shirt, I lie on a towel. Ben lifts a wax strip, looks it over, pats it down. We wait. He peels the strip off, quickly. Ow! He lifts a second strip, starts on a second patch. Ow! Ow! There’s always a little low-grade agony involved in this business of ripping out these damn hairs by the root. Ben is deft. The methodical movements seem to relax his body, too. He grows less tense, looser, after every fierce yank. Now — partly from a wish to help the guy, partly because I’m nosey, and partly to take my mind off the thousand-and-one needlepoint pinchings of the wax — I coax from him the story about what went wrong. Family fight, it turns out. A row with his father, who was angry when he found his only son was about to leave home to spend the night with friends.

  ‘He told me it was too late to go out. He told me I should stay at home. He told me I behave like bad son. He told me a good son stays at home with his family.’

  ‘Yet the son’s a grown man, twenty-five years old?’

  ‘My father, the moment I stepped through the door, slammed it shut and told me never to come back. Bad news, bro. A bummer.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it, Ben.’

  ‘I’m a bad son, man.’

  The only way he can make himself feel better, in the end, is by picking up the phone and dialling his dad and saying he’s sorry. They talk for a bit. Father seems willing to make peace. Ben, putting down the phone afterwards, gives a quick grimace.

  We clear away the hairy strips of wax. We go to bed. We try to get into some nooky. Not too memorably.

  ‘Okay, let’s just cuddle,’ I say. ‘I wanked earlier today, anyway.’

  ‘What is that word, wangke?’

  ‘Wanked. Masturbated.’

  ‘Dude, self-abuse? I seldom do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It wrecks your health, man. Self-abuse can nuke your memory.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘A website from the internet.’

  ‘A Chinese website, right? A website certified by the state?’

  ‘Yes, a website providing some information about the human body.’

  ‘Right, well — we used to think that way about wanking too, in our part of the world. Now we know it’s okay.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘A young man like you can easily wank two or three times a day.’

  ‘You’re talking shit, man!’

  ‘Our bodies evolved a million or more years ago to squirt out semen whenever a boy feels in the mood for a wank. Didn’t your dad tell you it was okay?’

  ‘Never. This is taboo. It’s shameful for a father or mother to remark about sex before kids. Westerners are wild, man. Too wild!’

  ‘Come on, let’s cuddle.’

  A cuddle is what I need right now, because suddenly I’m feeling glum. The poor guy, burdened with so much guilt. Poor me, too. My own dad told me no more than this other dad about sexual health or sexual sickness. Dad told me almost nothing about almost everything. He never talked to me about strength or weakness, softness or hardness, friendship, fondness, hatred, knowledge, ignorance, life, death. He never told me why, how. He never tipped me a hint, offered a word in my ear, just between you and me, son. He never even told me how to wax a hairy back!

  Why should this make me feel bad right now? Not what you’d call news, for fuck’s sake.

  A HEAVY HAND knocks on my door. Knock knock. A strong knock. Knock knock. A hard knock. Day after day I’ve been waiting for this knock on my door.

  I feel sick about Jay.

  The cops know I’ve got no way of proving myself innocent of murder. They know my story is shot through with holes. My story about that night, that night when the boy was last seen — that night when the body went into the creek. Of course I can’t prove myself innocent. I can’t prove myself innocent for the simple reason that I’m guilty.

  What am I going to do? Why has my life gone so wrong?

  What have I done to his life?

  Fixing the right kind of mask on my face, I open the door. Inspector Mao. Young Mr Sun. Young pudding-faced Mr Sun the Kafka doctoral student, not kind middle-aged Mr Sun of the turtle banquet. They know. They know it’s me who did it to Jay.

  ‘How are you?’ I say in Mandarin.

  ‘We are sorry to intrude, but must ask for some more of your time, Professor Morse,’ says the inspector in Shanghainese by way of Mr Sun’s bookishly correct English.

  Sweating, starting to stink of fear already, I show them into my living room. Inspector Mao makes himself at home the way he did when he first came here — when was it? Only a few days ago, earlier this week. Once more he lights up a Double Happiness. He seems to have a knack for putting himself at ease when very likely he always brings with him unease for others. I sit myself awkwardly on the rim of one of the hard armchairs. I do my best to look puzzled and honest and straightf
orward. I can smell my fear, though. I can taste it too. Sour, bitter — far more bitter than the blunt rankness of that first fag lit by the flatfoot.

  We go through a slow rigmarole of laboured questions about the characters of my various students, and the hours of my various classes, and whether or not I have any new thoughts about what might have become of Jay.

  ‘No new thoughts, no,’ I say, faking what I hope looks like placid good sense.

  Inspector Mao lights a fresh fag with the butt of the old fag.

  ‘Professor, you said when we last spoke that you are wretchedly unhappy.’

  ‘Did I? Very likely.’

  ‘Why are you wretchedly unhappy?’

  I heave a sigh — a deep sigh, a very deep sigh, in spite of myself — and feel the sinews of my face give up their tense pretence of making my skin look perky. My mouth seems to quiver, crumple down, cave in.

  ‘I’m lonely, Inspector. I’ve always been lonely. I wasn’t really loved when I was a little boy, and I’ve never really been loved as a grown man — not loved the way we wish for when we talk about love. Of course I’ve got my daughters, and my sister. I’m not meaning that sort of love. I’m meaning the sort of love where you lose yourself, and feel glad you’re lost. You want to be lost because it’s the only way to be found. Well, there’s feeble thinking for you. And here’s me supposedly an intellectual. Let’s just say I’m lonely, and lately I’ve become more aware than ever of that loneliness. Does this concern us now, though? Is this germane to your inquiry?’

  ‘Possibly,’ says Inspector Mao.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Would you say that your friendship with the missing young man was an intimate friendship?’

  Okay, pull yourself together, mate.

  ‘I’d say it was a good teacher–student relationship.’

  ‘Some of your other students feel that there was an emotional aspect to the relationship which was perhaps not quite proper between a teacher and a very handsome boy.’