Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  We work for another half an hour, and then we stop and start to pack our pens and papers. Jay, grinning, comes up to my desk.

  ‘It’s hard for be a teacher,’ he says.

  ‘Not when the students are as good as you, Jay.’

  He doesn’t flush, or duck his head, or show any sign that he’s worked on by my words, but looks at me levelly.

  ‘I know that if I make enough effort, everything in life will go well.’

  ‘Some things won’t go well — so you have to be ready for that — but it’s great to believe in yourself. Jay, your essay was the best in the class. Your work’s always the best in the class.’

  ‘I believe in myself,’ he says.

  ‘Good. You know what gets me down even more than the cheating by your classmates? It’s the way they’ve all written essays telling me what they’ve been told to think or believe, not what they really think or believe.’

  He laughs.

  ‘Are students different in the west?’

  ‘Well, they’re supposed to challenge — not parrot — what teachers say.’

  Jay doesn’t get parrot, so I start to spell it out. Grasping it in a jiffy, he laughs.

  ‘Chinese students work hard to flatter their teachers. Chinese students must not write what they really think.’

  ‘They’ve got to learn to write what they really think in my class.’

  ‘We don’t know how you mark until now,’ he grins.

  ‘I told you all in our first class — and it’s on the handout I gave all of you.’

  ‘Nobody believe your handout,’ he says, grinning more widely. ‘Nobody, only me!’

  Cheats and flatterers they may be, but some of my students have talked me into organising a weekend trip together to an old river village. We’re to meet at noon next day on the square in front of the Shanghai Railway Station. A clammy grey day, as it turns out. A skytrain gets me to the square too early so I walk into some of the nearby shopping malls. Christmas shows itself in the shape of stars, moons, baubles, glitter, bulging Santa after bulging Santa. A pavement outside one department store has been burdened by a steep pyramid of big shiny boxes of blue glass, giftwrapped with blue plastic, twined with silver tinsel, climbing ten metres into the forbiddingly bleak sky. Swinging back towards the square, I’m struck by the sight of a thick throng of black beetles. People! Peasants, milling about or resting, squatting on their haunches or plonked on top of their bags. Almost all wear black. Black hair, too — noggin after noggin of jet black, only here and there the head of someone young whose hair has been bleached orange or yellow — and from time to time the white cap of a Muslim.

  A bossy bloke in uniform starts shrilling his whistle.

  Country folk look up, baffled, from their wrack of bags and suitcases and gunnysacks. Working out that they’re evidently on the wrong side of a line on the pavement, they shuffle backwards. I see, bounding towards me, a strikingly tall young guy in tight faded blue jeans and faded blue jacket, his hair gelled into spiky curls. Slung over his shoulder is a big canvas bag printed with the word GIORDANO. He’s singing some pop song, happily.

  ‘Hi Jay,’ I say. ‘You’ve got a nice voice.’

  ‘I like singing,’ he says with one of his grins. ‘Since I was two years old I have learned ten thousand songs.’

  I let out a little laugh, partly at the way he’s taken the trouble to count the songs — coming up with a number is so Chinese — but mostly because his presence makes me feel pleased and silly.

  ‘Wow, that’s more songs than I knew could ever be sung.’

  ‘When I am happy, I sing a happy song. When I am sad, I sing a sad song. Walking, I sing a song. Rainy day, I sing a song. Sunny day, I sing a song. I’m living in my songs.’

  A group of girls from the class now skip up, followed shortly after by two boys, and then more girls. Sissy, scuttling across the square and running shortsightedly into an old woman, is the last of our party. She greets me breathlessly. The cold sore has got worse. The poor girl lifts her hand to hide her mouth when she speaks. She speaks a lot, nonetheless — as always. Our group goes across to a bus. Climbing its steps, we show our tickets and settle into seats. Sissy sits next to me, which I feel to be a bit of a letdown since I’ve been hoping in a formless kind of way to find myself seated with Jay. The doors swing shut. The bus sets off through the city.

  We drive for an hour.

  Kilometre after kilometre of relentless rows of apartment buildings come first, climbing up out of the tiled rooftops of little old alleys. Motorways segue smoothly into other motorways. Shanghai sure is ugly. Almost the only colour under the leaden sky comes from clothes hanging out to dry. Clothes are the softest thing to be seen in the city. Tender, tinted, draped or pegged from bamboo poles propped below the windows of the big bleak apartment blocks, they drift in the faint wind, sift the light. Yet even these makeshift little patchworks of free colour are under threat. Householders have been told by the municipal government not to hang out washing because it makes the town look like a backward village and not what it’s meant to look like, a modern city.

  ‘The city is so miserable, with the crowd of cold and tired strangers,’ says Sissy. ‘In the streets like the dead desert, crowded men and women, looking the unfeeling backs of the others and turning their backs blindly to the others, all their faces expressionless and frustrated, in a hurry.’

  ‘You said that very well, Sissy.’

  Vast futuristic towers loom upwards as we pass one of the commercial subcentres of the city. Some towers are a fanciful fifty storeys of retro Art Deco, topped with the scallops and volutes of thirties Manhattan, while others seem to be space probes for a robotic mission to Mars. Afterwards come the suburbs. Bungalows — street after street of them — the proud assets of the new middle class. Almost all look like clones of each other, their walls plastered white, their roofs tiled red. All are crammed into tightly walled yards. Raw new streets of these raw new bungalows fall away, finally, to show fields of bare earth lying fallow for the winter, canals, ponds, creeks, swamps, industrial parks. Sampans can be seen moored in sluggish cress-clogged backwaters, or poled by a man or a boy. The water is the colour of black tea stewed for too long and left to go cold. Verges of the motorway are deeply mulched with plastic bags, aluminium cans, rotting newspapers, old rags, coils of crap, shards of shit, glass cellophane brick plastic nylon glass concrete plastic plastic —

  ‘My friends and I go to barbecue last night,’ says Sissy. ‘Just need pay thirty-five yuan, you can eat as much as you want.’

  ‘And did you want very much?’

  We cross a wide canal. Barges, their snub poops and blunt prows buffered with black rubber tyres slung from the gunwales, nose their way up and down, heavily laden, trailing each other endlessly. We’re serenaded, meanwhile, by cellphones piping, peeping, chirping, cheeping. Cellphones playing ‘La Cucaracha’. Cellphones playing the opening bars of the overture to Rossini’s William Tell. Cellphones playing ‘Toreador’ from Bizet’s Carmen.

  ‘I ate three dishes of beef, two dishes of clam, two cups of icecream, with chocolate syrup.’

  ‘How did you fit it all in, Sissy?’

  ‘I feel drunk of eating.’

  Peasants are at work in the fields, bending their backs, paddling barefoot in the sloppy wet. The rich deep dirt of our delta has been a cash cow for imperial dynasty after imperial dynasty. The folk are lean, though — lean and wiry. Thousands of years have gone by during which thin sinewy folk have worked these fat muddy plains, ploughing and planting, ditching and hoeing, bowing and bending to a ceaseless cycle.

  Big brilliantly coloured hoardings display the wonders of more and more estates of new bungalows, hyping not only in Chinese but English.

  THE DREAM OF LAKES

  TOP FIRST VILLAS

  SUN ISLAND

  We swing off the motorway and onto a feeder road, which shortly unloads us at the old river village.

  ‘Okay, stick together
, gang,’ I say. ‘Let’s begin by looking at the sights.’

  ‘We must into the museum,’ says Sissy. ‘I never been there but my friends told me it’s a good place for the antiquity.’

  Paying, stepping inside, we start working our way through the displays. Sissy reads all the words written on little cards below the glass cabinets and translates for me, earnestly. We look at every last exhibit. Afterwards she leads the way as we thread through narrow cobbled alleys. Jay falls back a bit, joking and rough-housing with another boy. Whenever the lad comes anywhere near my radar, no matter what I’m doing, I find myself listening for the sound of his voice, his laughter — glancing back at the movements of his fit, flexible body. We start to get wet from a cold drizzle. One or two of us try to pop open our umbrellas, but the alleys are too narrow. We poke into little shops. We follow more alleys. We come to a stone bridge called the Life-Releasing Bridge.

  ‘The bridge has five arches and was builded in the sixteenth century,’ Sissy spells out helpfully.

  We walk onto the bridge, our breath vaporising in the cold. Shawled women with red cheeks are selling goldfish from coloured plastic bowls. Pay a coin and a woman will dip a bowl down into the rank water of the river and let the fish swim away. Frog meat can be bought, raw and slimy, from big enamel bowls. Mandarin oranges are also being sold nearby, glowing brilliantly — almost the same colour as the goldfish — under the dead grey sky.

  ‘One arch of this famous historic bridge fell down last year and plunged into the river,’ adds Sissy. ‘It has now been mended by the good work of the district council.’

  ‘So cold, so wet,’ whispers one of the girls in Mandarin.

  Jay’s gone quiet. I wonder why?

  Well, he very likely feels wretched with the dreariness of this drizzle. I know I feel wretched myself. Water, slithering down my spine from the nape of my neck, seems to grow chillier rather than warmer as it works its way towards my arse. Sigh. How about beaming myself up and zooming across the ocean onto the sand at Pines Beach? Or at least getting away from Sissy. Right now I wouldn’t mind if a second arch of the bridge were to fall down and drop our whole shivering crew into the river. We couldn’t get a lot wetter.

  ‘We’d better find somewhere for food and tea, hadn’t we?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, Professor!’ yells Jay.

  I jump a bit, though I did know — I knew very well — that my pet boy was standing behind my right elbow.

  A cheerless teahouse is where we settle down for food. We take a big cold table in a big cold room whose windows of warped glass look onto a big cold canal. As the kids give orders to a waitress, I lean into one of the windows and watch a woman who’s standing on stone steps by the water. The woman starts to wash a couple of rag mops. The work is awkward, heavy. Looks like she’s been doing it for years. She stoops, dunking the mops, rinses, whacks the mop heads against the steps, dunks once more, rinses, whacks — cold, hard, disheartening work. Above the canal hang frail red lanterns. Dirty boatmen, standing inside clinkerbuilt canal boats, drive their craft forward by a sort of torque movement of a single long oar. Veils of light rain are blurring the waterscape. Dimly stepping up into the sky on the other bank of the canal can be seen the walls of a pagoda.

  ‘Sissy,’ I say, ‘do you know anything about that pagoda?’

  Sissy turns to me delightedly. Of course she knows.

  ‘The pagoda is part of a temple builded in the middle of the fourteenth century during the Mongol dynasty, Professor. The temple is called the Goddess Temple.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  The bookish lass finds herself tongue tied trying to spell it out in my consonant-clogged language. I drink tea. The kids drink Coca-Cola. Dishes of food are laid, steaming in the numb air, while the youngsters chatter happily. I spell out to my monitor the right way to form the past participle of the verb build.

  Sissy thanks me fulsomely.

  We eat and drink and soon everyone looks pink and happy. The youngsters start talking about the stress of their lives as students. They agree that things were worse at middle school than at university. Stories start to be swapped about middle school years — stories told in the present tense, in English.

  ‘The competition in our class in my middle school is very heatedly,’ says a boy. ‘I work hard too, because I don’t want to fall behind others.’

  ‘I suffer a lot the pressure of study and tedious lifestyle,’ says a girl.

  ‘I’m always scolded by my parents,’ adds another girl. ‘Most times, it’s because my marks are not high enough to meet my parents’ expectations, and they are angry.’

  Sissy weighs in now, speaking to me on behalf of everybody.

  ‘Professor, you don’t know the tiredness and trouble of the students at middle school in this fast-spinning modern Shanghai. Most of us would go to night school or private tutors after school in order to outdo other students in study. We sometimes sleep only four or five hours a day and rest of day we work.’

  Jay, silent till now, frowns and speaks.

  ‘Chinese is obsess about high mark,’ he says. ‘As a matter of fact it is no use to produce a student who can only finish one exercise book after another, instead of living.’

  Sissy gives her pointed little head a short, sharp jerk.

  ‘I agree with Jay,’ she says in her favourite stentorian style. ‘The incorrect education method have become the top killer of happy childhood.’

  We sit talking and eating and drinking for two hours or more, unwilling to get up from the table and quit the chill of the teahouse for the chillier chill of the outside world. At last, groaning, we do get up. We step into the cobbled alley, wander into another cobbled alley — while I smile, because some of the girls have started singing — and cross a small stone bridge to look more closely at the pagoda. Jay and the other boys begin to sing along with the girls. Climbing to the top of the pagoda, we look across the water. Twilight has come. The sky, while darkening, stays drizzly.

  Graffiti has been scratched into the red plaster wall. We pick it out slowly, word by word.

  ‘May my grandmother have good health forever,’ Sissy translates for me from the characters of a text dug with something sharp.

  ‘I love money,’ says a text in English.

  Sissy and most of the other kids stop to light tapers outside the temple. They stand the tapers in the brazier of hot ash. They kowtow. They kowtow, too, in front of altars when we make our way through the various pavilions. Jay stays outside, not making any pious observances.

  ‘Sissy,’ I murmur after the last pavilion, ‘I didn’t know you were Buddhist.’

  ‘I am not,’ she says crisply. ‘I pray in the temple for good luck.’

  Odd, given that she’s also a member of the Party.

  Jay comes to me, having watched my monitor walk away to boss about some of the other girls, when we get back to the first pavilion. He tells me he’s been watching the slow darkening of the sky.

  ‘The night is full with breeze and darkness,’ he whispers. ‘That’s amazing.’

  He stands too close. I feel fidgety.

  ‘We won’t stay at the temple any longer,’ I say. ‘You boys and the girls need to get into our nice cosy guesthouse.’

  Jay stands so close I can count his eyelashes.

  ‘You are very good teacher to your little freshman, Professor.’

  Or does he say freshmen? No doubt he does, yet one silly bit of me wishes that he spoke in the singular.

  The guesthouse, booked by phone, proves to be neither cosy nor warm but a bleak barrack. The boys are all to bunk together in one big room, the girls in another big room, while I get shown by a grumpy old woman into a little square cell with one sagging bed, one good-luck knot of red nylon hanging from a nail on the wall, and one lightbulb dangling from a cracked ceiling. The boys laugh at the face I pull.

  We make up our minds to get cheerful by playing cards.

  We play in the room given to the boys, since it see
ms a bit less icy than elsewhere, and soon after settling on the floor with our bits of glazed cardboard the kids start telling tales about ghosts. All seem to believe in ghosts — all but Jay. Hours pass as we ooh and aah, and joke, and throw down and pick up our cards, and count our points. At midnight the girls drift away. The three boys and I play a last few hands of poker. Getting up off the floor and sitting on top of one of the beds, we drag blankets around ourselves to try to make a bit of warmth. The cards keep getting shuffled, dealt, played. On my right sits Jay. The two other lads sit at the opposite end of the bed. All three have folded their legs under themselves tidily, while mine are bent more stiffly and soon start to ache at the joints.

  ‘Kind of tired now,’ says one of the lads at the far end of the bed.

  ‘Me too,’ says the boy beside him.

  ‘So just go bathroom for shower,’ says the first boy. ‘And back here for go to sleep, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ says Jay. ‘I’m staying and talking to the Professor.’

  ‘Okay,’ say the other boys.

  Yet when the two yawning guys have sloped off towards the bathroom my brightest and boldest student says not a word to his professor but stares silently down at the red and white and black of the playing cards scattered, winking, across a tangle of sheets and blankets.

  I begin to feel awkward.

  ‘Anything definite you want to say, Jay?’

  Silence. He keeps staring down at the blankets. I now feel not only awkward but shy, as though I’ve become a youngster myself, though I don’t know why.

  Jay, lunging at the tangled blankets, grabs a fistful. He throws white sheets into the air. He snatches a sheet and hurls it on top of my head. I let out a little strangled laugh, astonished, while at the same time thinking that maybe I now look like one of those ghosts the kids were scaring themselves with before.