by Justin Hill
‘What spirit do you have?’
The waitress smiled. ‘Sorghum Wine, Rice Wine, Plum Wine, Chrysanthemum Wine.’
‘Which is the most expensive?’
‘Sorghum wine.’
‘OK, two bottles.’
She wrote it down. ‘And food?’
‘Fatty Meat and Red Cooked Fish. Fried Chicken, Grass Fish, Smoked Tofu, Lotus Root, and Three Flavour Soup.’
‘Anything else?’
‘We should have dumplings,’ his mother said, ‘because now we are together again.’
‘A kilo of dumplings,’ Da Shan said, and the waitress smiled dimples into her two red cheeks as she wrote it down.
‘Anything else?’
‘Marlboro cigarettes.’
‘And?’
Da Shan stared into her almond eyes and said, ‘No. Thank you. That’s it.’
When the wine came Da Shan poured it into three cups and declared a toast, ‘To an unfilial son!’
‘No, no,’ Old Zhu corrected, ‘To a parent’s joy.’
They drank the wine down, it was fierce and ruthless. Old Zhu and Da Shan drank two more glasses before the dishes arrived. Their cheeks were red with the alcohol, their talk expansive. They laughed together, Da Shan lit a cigarette and gave it to his father, then turned to his mother and said, ‘Eat! Eat!’
She didn’t. Da Shan picked out the choice piece of fish and put it on her plate. He picked out the chicken’s head and put it next to the fish, pulled a rich hunk of grass fish, and piled it on top. Body parts collected on her plate, but she didn’t eat them.
‘Eat! Eat!’ Old Zhu said.
She didn’t eat.
Da Shan called the waitress over. She came willingly and smiled.
Da Shan pointed with the hand holding his cigarette. ‘This food is no good. My mother can’t eat it. Take it back.’
The girl’s face dropped. She nodded once, then ran off to the manager. The manager came over. He was a smiling man with a worried look.
‘This food’s shit,’ Da Shan declared. ‘My mother can’t eat it.’
The manager looked. ‘I’m very sorry. I’ll fetch the cook.’
The cook came, wiping his fingers on his stained white coat. He was a loud-laughing man, till he stood in front of Da Shan, when he desperately smothered his bemused look.
‘What’s this rubbish you’ve cooked?’ Da Shan shouted. ‘My mother hasn’t eaten anything. Who taught you to cook? A dog?’
The chef apologised.
‘I don’t want fucking apologies. I want food my mother can eat!’ Da Shan raged, red-faced and spittle flying.
The manager stepped forward and addressed the grey-haired old woman. ‘Please lady, what would you like to eat?’
‘I want to go home.’
‘What’s the most expensive thing on the menu?’ Da Shan demanded.
The manager asked the cook, ‘What have we got in?’
The cook gave a shrug. ‘Crayfish, Turtle Soup. Snake’s Gall, Fried Scorpions.’
‘Bring them all!’ Da Shan shouted and Old Zhu joined in as he poured more sorghum wine. The wine spilled over in Da Shan’s cup, he missed his own cup altogether.
‘Bring them all!’ Old Zhu shouted. ‘The most expensive things on the menu!’ He drank his cup down in one, and Da Shan handed him another cigarette.
‘More cigarettes!’ Da Shan shouted.
‘More wine!’ Old Zhu chorused.
‘More food!’
The table groaned under the weight of the bill that was presented to Da Shan. As he counted out the money the kilo of dumplings cooled and stuck together. A bestiary of animals lay uneaten. Old Zhu was drunk and replete. His wife hadn’t touched a thing. Da Shan watched her with red, baleful eyes. She put a hand to her grey hair as if she were a young wife. ‘Have you both had enough?’ she asked gently.
Old Zhu burped. Da Shan took a scorpion and crunched it in his mouth, and spat it out half eaten. He was drunk and confused.
‘If you have had enough, then I will eat a little,’ his mother said and took a dumpling. She dipped it in red chilli paste, and put it in her mouth, and chewed slowly. Da Shan watched her eat with dull satisfaction. He poured another toast for his father and himself. ‘To your wife, and my mother!’ he declared. And they drank.
Old Zhu looked at his wife and son. ‘Filial piety is the source of civilisation!’ he declared.
‘A husband is Heaven. You can’t leave Heaven, nor your husband,’ his wife corrected.
Da Shan silenced them both. He poured out the last of the wine and gave them cups to drink. He stood up and quoted Deng XiaoPing–To be rich is glorious!–and then fell down laughing.
When the sun rose Old Zhu’s wife was already up, making breakfast. The sound of her chopping shallots echoed through the whole block, pulling Old Zhu back from sleep. He lay and wriggled under the quilt, then stood up, stretched his old limbs and found his old body as stiff as a gnarled tree. Outside it was raining, warm spring rain soaking green back into the landscape.
Good for the peasants, he thought as he got dressed, good for the soil.
‘It’s raining,’ Old Zhu said to his wife as he walked past her into the bathroom.
‘It’s always raining,’ she said. ‘All this place ever does. Rain in winter and rain in summer. It’s like living in a piss pot.’
‘It’s early, should be good for the peasants,’ he said optimistically.
‘Since when have you been a peasant?’ she asked, stirring the soya-bean milk. ‘What do we care about the peasants? They’re all right,’ she muttered to herself. ‘What about us?’
She stood and watched the soya milk till it boiled, then she ladled it out into one large bowl and called out, ‘Come! Eat!’
Old Zhu was on the balcony smelling all the damp odours of soil and spring. He heard her call and came back in. ‘I think I’ll do some planting today,’ he declared to no one in particular.
‘Come! Eat!’ his wife shouted towards Da Shan’s room. ‘Food!’
Da Shan woke to the hangover that had patiently waited in his head all night. He forced himself upright, dressed, then came out and slumped down at the table. His mother cleared her throat as she filled each person’s bowl, set steamed bread buns out on the table. The two men ate and drank in silence while she kept talking.
Da Shan wasn’t hungry. He swirled his soya milk around the bowl clockwise, and then anti-clockwise and his mother watched him. She cleared her throat again, but he ignored her. She cleared her throat, louder this time, and Da Shan looked up. Not at her, at his father. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘what ever happened to the Family Genealogy?’
His mother heard the kettle boil and jumped up, pushing back her chair with a loud scrape as she hurried to the kitchen. Old Zhu carried on eating his soup, spoon by spoon.
‘Father.’
Old Zhu looked up with tired old eyes.
‘What happened to the Family Genealogy?’
Old Zhu lifted a spoonful of soup to his lips and then put it back into the bowl, and looked down. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘The Zhu Family Genealogy. What happened to it?’
Old Zhu looked towards the kitchen where his wife was pouring the water into thermos flasks. The stream of water from kettle spout to thermos an arc of steaming water.
‘I want to know where that book is,’ Da Shan said.
‘I burnt it.’
‘When?’
‘In 1967.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
His mother came back, looked at her husband’s face and then her son. Da Shan sat back and stared at her, arms folded.
‘What’s wrong with you two?’ she asked.
Old Zhu ate his soup and Da Shan stared.
‘You’re like a pair of old bulls,’ she scolded, ‘with no cows to fight over.’ Neither of them responded. ‘Serves you right for drinking like a pair of village dogs.’
Old Zhu cleared his throat. ‘He wants to know what happened to our Family Genealogy.’
Her eyes flickered from one face to the other.
‘I’ve told him I burnt them,’ Old Zhu said.
‘You did,’ she agreed.
‘Why?’ Da Shan asked again.
‘We had to,’ she told him.
They finished their breakfast in silence, thoughts chattering in their heads. When Old Zhu had scraped his bowl clean he stood up and went to the bathroom. He hawked and spat noisily, then flushed the toilet with water from the bucket. He came out humming the national anthem, and bent to put his boots on.
‘Where are you off to?’ his wife demanded. ‘It’s raining.’
‘It’s not heavy,’ he said.
‘You’ll get wet.’
Old Zhu tied the lace of his left shoe first, and then started on his right. ‘I’ll take a coat.’
‘Why do you have to go out now?’
‘It’s time to plant the onions.’
‘Onions indeed! Why did I marry such a crazy old man–always planting vegetables.’
Old Zhu pulled out an army surplus raincoat, thick and green with a large hood that he pulled over his head, then turned and walked out.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded of Da Shan as he stood up.
‘Nowhere.’
‘Why not? I don’t want you here cluttering up the house.’
‘But it’s raining,’ Da Shan said, and she muttered in reply.
Da Shan brushed his teeth and then opened the door of his father’s study and walked in. The air hung heavy with memories and the smell of books. Da Shan had stood here as a child reciting poetry. By the age of ten he’d learnt all the classics, the Words of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx too, but the Ancient Classics were the hardest. They were full of strange references, characters no one used any more, and his father had beaten him for each mistake.
‘These stupid poems don’t even rhyme!’ he’d said to his mother one day, and his father had overheard.
‘How dare you say that! You treacherous little bourgeois!’ his father had shouted as he hit him. Old Zhu hadn’t been a white-haired old man then; and Da Shan had only been a child. ‘People have studied these poems for a thousand years!’ his father had raged before putting pink stripes all over Da Shan’s hand with his bamboo cane. Da Shan’s childhood was layered with beatings. Each thrashing made him more convinced that any problem in China was intimately linked with her poems, and the fact that her greatest poetry no longer rhymed.
Now he stood and weathered the images and memories, scarred over by time. He scanned the bookshelf for the book he was looking for, pulled it out, and then sat down to read.
Da Shan’s mother washed up the breakfast pots and began cleaning the flat, moving in a regular pattern–a wide circle around the bedroom. When she had swept the kitchen, toilet, main room and porch she went into the bedroom and quickly cleaned around the wardrobe. She cleaned the whole flat except the study, where Da Shan sat reading. It annoyed her he was in there because she was used to having the flat to herself.
Morning passed as she walked past the doorway at regular intervals, peering in to see what he was up to, but Da Shan didn’t look up or say anything, even though she was sure he’d seen her. In retaliation she turned the radio on, loud; began chopping pork and egg plant for lunch; smashed cloves of garlic with the flat other chop, then shredded the remains. She banged and clattered in the kitchen till making noise became an end to itself, and carried on banging even when she’d forgotten why she’d started. The radio reception slowly wandered till there was more crackle than words, so she tuned it in again and turned it up when the hourly bulletin came on. All the news was good but the world she lived in was so wrong.
When yin and yang are poorly mixed the world is muddy.
It was certainly true in Shaoyang, she thought, what with all this rain.
Da Shan came out of the study only as she was heating the oil in the wok for lunch.
‘We’re eating early today,’ he commented.
‘How would you know when we eat? We eat when the food is cooked, that’s when we eat.’
Threads of smoke curled up from the oil as he stood in the kitchen doorway with a book of poems in his hand. He held it up. ‘Father never made me learn this one,’ he laughed.
She gave him a sidelong glance but didn’t answer. The spine of the book read Ten Thousand Tang Dynasty Poems.
‘Since when did you like reading poems?’ she said. ‘You always hated poems.’
Da Shan ignored her and read out the title: ‘Li Bai’s Poem to Du Fu’.
She looked at him as he held up the book; scowled as he chanted the lines, reading quickly and nonsensically. Then Da Shan stopped and repeated the last two lines:
Du Fu, how come you’ve grown so thin?
You must be suffering from too much poetry.
His mother didn’t laugh. ‘Does your father know you’re going through his books?’ she asked.
‘I was looking for something.’
‘And did you find it?’
‘No.’
‘Wah!’
Da Shan lowered the book, let it hang by his side. ‘What did happen to the Family Genealogy?’ he asked.
‘Your father burnt it.’
‘In 1967?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘It was from the past,’ she said, turning the heat up. ‘It was dangerous to keep it.’
‘Do you think he can remember any of it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, the oil smoking. ‘Ask him.’
‘How about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘How about your family?’
She looked at him.
‘Where did they come from?’ he asked.
‘Why are you so interested in history?’ she retorted as she lifted the pan from the flames. ‘How can I remember all those silly things? It’s all past and finished.’
Da Shan stayed in the doorway, flicked through a few pages, came across a poem or line; flicked forward again. His mother put the pan back on the heat, tipped the pork into the oil which hissed and spat as malevolently as a cornered cat, then stepped back for a few seconds until it was safe to reach out and turn the gas down. Da Shan watched her stir the meat shreds round and round till all their raw redness had turned to a cooked pink.
‘I don’t remember where they were from,’ his mother said suddenly. ‘I think it was Suzhou.’
Da Shan looked up. ‘Your family?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did they do there?’
‘Police.’
‘Not for the Communists?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Were they Guomindang?’
‘Maybe.’
Da Shan continued flicking through the book of poems. After a long pause he asked, ‘So how did you get to join the Communists?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘It was all a long time ago.’
They sat and ate lunch in silence, waiting for someone to speak; but no one did. Old Zhu scraped his bowl clean of rice and then swilled a glass of tea around his mouth to dislodge food from between his teeth, which he swallowed before getting up and going back to his allotment.
Da Shan watched his mother as she cleared away the plates and bowls, tipping all the uneaten food onto one plate that she cleaned off into the bin. When he’d first seen his mother she’d looked so old. Noticeably so. But since his return her wrinkles were filling out and her stoop was straightening like a bent bamboo that springs effortlessly back.
Da Shan had a cigarette on the balcony, looked down to the allotments where his father’s frosty white head bent and rose and dipped as he dug the soil. When Da Shan had finished he came back in and he went and stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the door post.
‘Have you ever been to Suzhou?’ he asked his mother.
‘No,’ she said, rolling up her s
leeves and beginning to scrub the pots, ‘not since liberation.’ She continued scrubbing and he watched without speaking.
‘What was your father like?’
She glanced up at him, and smiled. ‘He was very kind. You look like him.’
‘Do I?’ Da Shan said surprised, and folded his arms.
‘He was a very well-educated man,’ she said. ‘He sent us to the best school in the district, even though we were girls.’
‘And your grandfather?’
‘I never met my grandfather. We lived in the city. He was a businessman I think. Traded in silk. Everyone in the village traded in silk. It was exported as far as America and India, they said.’
‘Why did your father join the Guomindang?’
She laughed humourlessly. ‘He wanted to liberate China from all the imperialists. That was all.’
‘But he was in the police.’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to him at liberation?’
‘He went to Taiwan with Jiang Kaishi.’
‘Did you ever hear from him again?’
‘No.’
Da Shan nodded. His mother wiped the cooker top. ‘What did he think of you being a Communist?’ Da Shan asked.
‘Oh, he didn’t know for a long time. Such a long time. I was a spy on my own father!’ she laughed. ‘What a terrible daughter I was!’ She held the cloth in her hands and looked for something else to wipe but couldn’t find anywhere, so she wiped the side again. ‘I told the Communists who he was meeting, what he was doing. After 1980 we were allowed to write to people abroad. I wanted to apologise to him, tell him I was wrong. But the letter came back, he’d died of course.’
A thoughtful quiet filled the room.
‘When did you meet Father?’ Da Shan asked.
‘Oh–just before liberation.’
‘What was he like then?’
‘Very handsome.’
‘He was a Communist.’
‘Yes, oh yes. He was a teacher, that’s how we met. He was my teacher and he introduced me to socialism and patriotism.’
Da Shan stayed silent as he watched his mother empty the washing bowl and wring the cloth dry. She wiped the sink then hung the cloth up to dry.
‘So what was it like in 1967?’