Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘You’ve read it?’

  ‘When we got to Xuzhou. You understand very well how to tell the truth to people while telling them lies. You write in such a way that people understand they must read between the lines. If we are ever to be free, such is the repression around us, we must all learn to be able to talk in such a way while inside of ourselves knowing the truth.’

  Oh China, I think, you are so full of wonderful surprises!

  At one o’clock Chao and I climb the outside ladder on to the restaurant car roof. We are greeted with wild applause. It is an extraordinary scene. All around us are snow-covered mountains, glaring white in the light of a full moon, blasts from the Glasgow boiler echoing hard around them. The locomotive climbs steadily, with a river below us. We walk forwards to the front of the carriage, our audience parting before us, holding up hands when we seem unsteady. When a tunnel approaches a warning shout goes up and we crouch. This is the most unusual public meeting I have ever attended!

  We turn to face them so the wind carries our voices back to our listeners. Chao flatteringly introduces me as an honest newspaperman. I blush slightly. He says that I have written a famous novel called Rickshaw Boy, a story about the sufferings of the working classes and the necessity for united action. This gets a rousing cheer. He says he hasn’t read it yet but will buy a copy as soon as we reach Wuhan. He urges everyone else to do this. (Authors always like to hear things like this.) All those individuals who don’t have enough money to buy one he urges to come to the station to borrow his copy.

  He sits down. I am to speak. I stare at my windswept, expectant audience. The thunderous blasts issuing powerfully from the locomotive at first disrupt me, but I soon learn to speak between them, giving my speech a staccato and powerful rhythm. I cover the points I made in my article – the bravery and optimism of our troops, the shortage of modern weaponry and equipment (a clear encouragement to industrial workers to produce more and for their employers to take smaller profits), and the courage and wisdom of our great leader Chiang Kai-shek. (The cheer for our leader is considerably weaker than the cheer for our troops.) As in my article, I make no mention of our generals. I end up with a brief appeal for Chinese patriotism, of people starting to think of themselves as Chinese, one people, not so that we can go out and conquer other people, but so that we can defend ourselves against and defeat the foreign invaders and then build for ourselves a nation that is just, compassionate, uncorrupt and equal.

  Fantastic cheers. I sit down, Chao stands up. At last the speech we’ve all come to hear.

  He smiles. ‘You are not going to like my talk,’ he says. ‘Because, if we are going to defeat the Japanese, it involves us Chinese people enduring a terrible amount of suffering, a lot of dying. We will have to endure worse things than any other people in history. It will kill many of us, perhaps even most of us. But if we are to survive, not just as individuals, but as a nation, we have no alternative.’

  Always start on a positive note, I reflect.

  ‘It is not the first time in our history we have suffered terribly. There were the Zhou dynasties, which collapsed into the chaos and slaughter of the Warring States til the emergence of our first emperor. The Great Emperor seized control and ruled. Then he died and was followed by terrible civil wars til the Han Dynasty brought peace and ruled for four hundred years, til it too collapsed into the Three Kingdoms, and so these cycles went on til our own times with the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty and our unending civil wars. Why is the Mandate of Heaven given, why is it taken away? Why is order always followed by chaos, chaos by order? Because when life is good, life is easy, people forget how to work together, look out for each other, cooperate. Things fall apart. People fall apart. Communities fall apart. But then things become so terrible that people suddenly remember the bonds between each other, the necessity of looking out for each other. People remember they are not just individuals but a people. The Chinese people remember they are China. The Mandate of Heaven is restored.’

  I shouldn’t have criticized him for starting on such a negative note. People understand, appreciate him for telling the truth. He is listened to in total silence. The deep, deep silence of people digesting, understanding, empathizing.

  The train thunders through gorges, and suddenly spans out across ravines on the slenderest of viaducts with dizzying falls on either side of us and rivers far below. All the time above us the mountains are silent and white in the moonlight. We are among the gods.

  ‘I shall tell you why we are going to win this war. Because the Chinese are ceasing to be divided into provinces and minorities and regions. Because the Japanese invasion is jamming us up against each other so that once more, after such a long time of being divided and estranged, this catastrophe is reminding us we can only survive if we are together, as one.’

  A cheer goes up. The Glasgow-built locomotive thunders on ahead.

  ‘We are having to unite, whether we like it or not, under the banner of central government. For good or bad, regionalism is dead. Unite or die.’

  More cheers.

  ‘Why will we win this war? I will give you the brutal truth. Because united we are a massive nation. And the Japanese are a tiny one. We have hundreds of millions of people, they have only millions. They are far ahead of us in technology. They can invent machines that slaughter millions of poorly armed Chinese, but there are still tens of millions of us, hundreds of millions of us. If they kill four, five Chinese for every Japanese we kill, by that count, when we have killed every Japanese there will still be hundreds of millions of Chinese alive. They are terribly short of raw materials to build all their technology, their weapons. Believe me, I study the newspapers. And while they are fighting us, as they are drawn further and further into the interior of our land because they need our raw materials, up our roads and valleys and railway lines, into our mountains, so they will become more and more thinned out, isolated, vulnerable – so it is we, who are many, who are united, that will become strong, they weaker and weaker. In our vast country they will become cut off and surrounded by us. So many of them will die that to replace them their factories will have to be stripped of workers, their machines will start to fail. The Japanese rely on their machines. Without them they will die. We Chinese rely on our farming. No matter how much of our land is occupied by them, no matter how many battles we lose as they stumble ever deeper into our grasp, there will still be land to farm, to feed us. The Japanese will perish, we will survive.’

  Cheers.

  ‘One more brutal truth before I stop. This terrible war must not finish quickly. It has to last a long time. Many must die. So that at the end of it we are truly one people. That we do not immediately revert to factionalism and infighting. Because if we do, we will immediately be faced by another war. Ladies and gentlemen, I say this. Educate yourselves. Like me. Learn to read. Understand how the world works. So that never again will the world be able to creep up on us and take us hostage. We will suffer. Our children will suffer. But maybe our grandchildren need not suffer.’

  He finishes. The audience is silent. So are the mountains.

  14

  SPIDER GIRL – THE BACKSTORY 1

  Spider Girl realized immediately, as she read Old Man Chen’s newspapers about the Japanese invasion, of their terrifying advance across China, that it would be necessary for her family to flee their home. It would also be necessary for her family to abandon her in their flight. There could be no way she could keep up with their pace. And her mother would not allow her to consume precious food and drink.

  From the very start Spider Girl planned to survive on her own. She bought the ointment from her village apothecary to soothe her hips and joints. She sewed what little money she had into her garments. She kept her knife close to her at all times, sharpening it frequently on her whetstone.

  And she took something even more strange. In the narrow passageway between their farmhouse and the outside courtyard wall on the north side of their compound, close to whe
re Cherry Blossom hid her baby hedgehog, Spider Girl too kept a secret pet. A friendly, dozy old black snake. She just liked it. She kept it in a pot. When they were digging up the ground in the spring she fed it worms and centipedes. If there was a sudden glut of spiders, caterpillars, frogs or mice, she fed them to it. She and the snake were quite good friends. Sometimes, when she felt like it, especially when the sun shone, she took it out and played with it in her hands, letting it wind itself lazily around her arms. She always did this when she was by herself because she did not wish rumours to spread that she was a witch.

  On the day they left she decided the old snake could be useful to her. So, feeding it a live mouse, she sealed the small jar it was in and buried it in the wheat of the large jar which she calculated would be the last jar her father would open. Her concealment went unnoticed. No one else in the family realized they were accompanied by a black snake on their journey.

  But above all she planned to survive by keeping her eyes and ears wide open. Spider Girl had the eye of a practised thief. Not so much because she was dishonest – though she was – but because to survive with her disability and move successfully through the world she had had to develop from the earliest age an eye for the unusual, the unexplained, that which did not add up. And she had the curiosity and acumen to follow these sightings up and find out why certain things behaved in certain ways.

  So as soon as her family joined the great refugee columns across the plains of Central China, Spider Girl looked about her continuously. Noticed how different people walked in different ways, judged their wealth by their clothing and possessions, their moods by the way they held their heads and shoulders. But above all she sought for the unusual. Those who were not as they appeared. People who seemed poor and ragged with few belongings but were also plump of belly and calf and moved without weariness or despair. Individuals who followed other people or groups of people, always at a set distance, watching them intently. People who came up to you in a friendly fashion and talked to you in a friendly voice while all the time their eyes wandered over your possessions, your clothing. She had to warn the generous-minded Eldest Son twice when such people tried to engage him in friendly banter. Pretty soon she divided people strictly into those who were watched and those who watched. She watched the watchers.

  Simultaneously she observed the deterioration of her own standing within her family. Her mother’s increasingly open hostility and criticism of her, her father’s defensiveness and indecision. She saw the sudden horror on his face when he at last realized his wife had been deliberately starving herself to feed Eldest Son. She knew that as a man of honour he would soon and rightly decide he must put his family’s survival before her own. She also knew that, having run out of the village apothecary’s ointment, with her hips and thighs inflamed with pain, there was only so much more walking she could do.

  She must act.

  Her eyes scanned the ranks of her fellow refugees, seeking any sign of weakness, vulnerability. Her eyes alighted on one group. She’d noticed them several times before as their cart drew ahead of the Weis’ or fell behind it. Their large handcart sported an ostentatious yellow hood and was drawn by a giant of a young man, whose very power and size kept any would-be robbers or bandits well clear of them. But this time Spider Girl noticed the contemptuous way in which this huge fellow was treated by the three young men he was travelling with. They gathered round him, openly mocking and insulting him before parading off as a group into the crowds. One even kicked him. But all the giant did in reply was smile gently back. Spider Girl was interested in him. The giant was obviously a simpleton.

  His three companions were equally obviously thieves. They dressed in loud (stolen) clothes, their necks and hands flashed with gaudy jewellery, they walked openly with knives and weapons on their belts. They were clearly highly incompetent thieves. Competent thieves do not swagger around announcing themselves to all and sundry. The ease with which they could attack their enfeebled and starving fellow refugees had obviously emboldened them and made them lose any fear of retribution. Which made them in turn vulnerable.

  The final crisis came within her family. Grandfather fumbled the bowl she had passed him; a tiny amount of water was spilt. It was enough. Her mother immediately blamed her and demanded her expulsion. As the cart trundled on an immense row burst out between her mother and father at the front of the cart. Everyone’s attention was focused on this. Which gave Spider Girl a brief window of opportunity. Her hips flaming with pain, she wriggled on to the back of the cart, poured a small amount of water into the dropped bowl and handed it back to Grandfather so he would not thirst, then dived beneath the blue canvas and removed the seal to the wheat jar where she’d hidden her snake. She pulled its jar out, but as she did so she felt something else buried beside it. She drew it out. It was the other stone bottle of wild pear juice which her father had hidden before he’d left the farm. She held it in her hand, calculating. She would not take it – but not because, with her departure, the family would now be split in two, so this link to her family’s ancestors would continue in both branches in case one did not survive. No, Spider Girl did not rate herself as that important. She was going to take it because at this stage she was not planning to permanently separate from her family but rather to shadow them, to help in any emergency, to protect them. In such circumstances it was better the precious juice was preserved in two places rather than one. This decided, she slipped it beneath her clothing beside the snake jar and, grabbing a handful of mouldy dumplings, wriggled off the cart.

  She stood still as the cart and the furious argument continued on its way. Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl Wei walked past her hand in hand, far too agog at the shouting to even notice her. Never before had they witnessed such anger and dissension within the family. Spider Girl stared after her receding family. Her beloved grandfather, her honourable father, her truthful mother, bewildered Eldest Son, sly Cherry Blossom, courageous Second Son, entertaining Baby Girl Wei, unformed Baby Boy Wei. Terrible emotion swept through her, revolt and anger almost overwhelmed her, but then, setting herself, she turned away and, her rickety legs shooting terrible pains, hobbled towards the giant hauling his cart.

  You must appear relaxed, she told herself, speak to him politely, in a friendly manner, but with quiet authority. She straightened her back, despite the pains walked more correctly, normally. Approached him.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  He was enormous.

  ‘How are you?’

  He grunted in response.

  ‘I thought you might like something to eat. You look hungry.’

  The giant smiled. She handed him a mouldy dumpling. He ate it with relish. Spider Girl calculated from this that any sort of food – even mouldy dumplings – were welcomed by him because he was probably last in line for food when his ‘companions’ ate. In fact they probably didn’t feed him at all, relying on his enormous bulk to keep him going. She gave him another dumpling.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I was hungry.’

  She gave him her two last mouldy dumplings.

  As he munched contentedly they walked along.

  ‘I happened to meet your three friends,’ she said. ‘We had a chat and they said I must cook a meal for you all – especially you.’

  This obviously pleased the giant a lot.

  ‘I am a very good cook. I wonder if you could lift me into the back of the cart so that I can prepare the food so that when your companions get back you can stop the cart and all of you can eat a really good meal?’

  With a broad grin on his face the giant picked her up and placed her gently in the back of the canvas-roofed cart. Then he walked round to the front and resumed the journey.

  The cart was filled with what Spider Girl expected – gaudy stolen clothes, cheap jewellery and knick-knacks, uneaten food and dirty bowls. A thieves’ den. She wormed her way to the front of the cart, turned, set her back firm against its front board so she faced backwards
, towards the entrance, placed her knife beneath her right leg, took out the jar which contained her black snake and placed it on her left side. She awaited the return of the three thieves.

  *

  They returned very soon. Spider Girl heard them approach. They were very happy, loudly boasting about how they’d killed a young girl and stolen her silk scarves. The one Spider Girl took to be their leader – he had a deeper, harder voice and the other two deferred to him – boasted about raping her first.

  ‘She was lush. So soft. I just gave it to her and gave it to her.’

  ‘You did, Wolf Man, you did.’

  ‘First I knifed her,’ said their leader, ‘then I knifed her,’ he chortled.

  Spider Girl’s jaw set.

  ‘Wolf Man,’ said a third voice, ‘before you knife her next time – with your knife – can I fuck her after you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the other one, ‘and me.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Wolf Man, ‘we’ll see.’

  They’d reached the giant and started clowning about with him, obviously trying some of the silk scarves on him and complimenting him on his feminine beauty. He took it all in good heart.

  ‘Give these to the new cook,’ he told them. ‘She would look good in them.’

  ‘What new cook, Ox?’ asked Wolf Man.

  ‘Yeah,’ said another.

  ‘The new cook you sent, to cook for us all.’

  ‘I never sent no one to cook for us, Ox. What you talking about, you melt?’

  ‘The lady. She was very nice. She said she’d come to cook us all meals. I put her in the back so she could start cooking.’

  ‘What?!? You put her in the back? Where all our gear’s to?’

  ‘She was very nice.’

  ‘She’ll have nicked the fucking lot, Ox, and hopped it miles ago.’ Wolf Man then hit Ox the giant, and all the others joined in, without any seeming effect on him. The cart stopped.