Amid all this earnest busyness Lao She was at a bit of a loose end. It had started to snow, so he helped erect an awning over the dressing tables to give patients and those helping them some shelter, but then he just stood there. Beside him stood a large stern-looking country girl with a shopping basket. He’d noticed that as she approached she walked with a peculiar gait. The two of them stood there watching all this rather morbid activity, the country girl with some relish. Lao wondered if he should talk to her but her manner put him off. Feng, noticing Lao’s inactivity, told him to start rolling up the disinfected bandages Li had brought. Lao did this and pretty soon also found himself helping Feng to heave the wounded on and off the table and hold them down, writhing and screaming, as Hu’s deft fingers removed shards of shrapnel or bullets from their bodies.
Lao She found all this gruesomeness strangely relieving. It took his mind off what he was really dreading – reading the names of the East Coast writers and playwrights he’d be teaching tomorrow. He knew that Feng’s staff officer was due to arrive any moment, carrying their names. He’d decided that he could endure anyone except one individual: China’s most feted intellectual, most Han-accented Marxist – Guo Morou. He threw himself with enthusiasm into dabbing a gangrened stomach with disinfectant.
Agnes and Li’s private conference broke up. They returned to the table. As they did the country girl waddled up to Agnes.
‘Change of plan,’ said Agnes to her. ‘We’re going to have guests tonight. Two special guests.’ Li Dequan passed Agnes some money, which Agnes handed to the girl. ‘So you’ll have to buy some quality food and cook it well.’
‘I will,’ replied the girl.
Spider Girl waddled off through the snow – it was only a shower – to do her shopping.
Almost immediately Feng’s adjutant arrived accompanied by two medical orderlies who were to relieve Agnes and Hu. The adjutant handed an envelope to Feng. Lao washed and dried his hands and Feng handed him the envelope and winked. ‘Give them hell.’ Lao looked at it gingerly and tucked it swiftly into his jacket pocket. He wished everyone a quick farewell and trudged off through the snow.
*
Having made my escape I walk along the Bund towards my ferry. It is the Chinese New Year. A very peculiar New Year, in fact, especially in Wuhan. Probably through most of China.
Central to our New Year celebrations are visits to the graves of our ancestors. Feasting, toasting their lives, thanking them for their achievements, filling them in with the latest events in our own lives (about which they are invariably curious), showing them reverence. The only problem this year is that large numbers, perhaps a majority of us Chinese, cannot visit and honour our ancestors’ graves. Due to the Japanese invasion many, many of us can no longer access them. Frequently they are hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. Like myself.
The native inhabitants of Wuhan can still visit their family graves and pay them reverence, raucously celebrate their lives with fireworks and drinking and feasting – and that is going on all around us – but many of us here, have no graves we can visit, no ancestors we can chat with and ask advice from. We are adrift and lost from them. We feel that we should celebrate, but the more we feel that emotion the more we realize how and why we cannot.
Suddenly I am hit full in the face by a snowball.! A group of young children, celebrating the New Year in their own particular way, have decided to pelt me with snowballs. Outrageous! I lean down and, fashioning a snowball of my own, pelt it in their direction. This somewhat one-sided fight lasts for a short while, til their attention diverts to a Mongol on a camel and I slip away, wiping the snow from my glasses.
This has greatly raised my spirits. A bit of New Year’s cheer. In fact, I decide, I am actually up enough to reading this list of my students to be. I stop, remove the envelope from my pocket, breathe in, open the envelope, hesitate, then unfold the paper, read it, breathe out. Well, at least Guo Morou isn’t on it!!! But the others! Tian Boqi – fanatic Han-Marxist playwright, from the very finest American schools and universities, whose plays and diatribes are lionized by intellectuals from Shanghai to Nanking to New York. One of his plays, I am told, was even performed before soldiers of the Communist Eighth Route Army in Yan’an. Apparently it only survived one performance. Then there’s Comrades Zou Feng and Chu Taofen, Moscow-trained theorists famed for the length and impenetrability of their writings. A wild anarchist called Yu Yong. A woman poet, Shan Shuang – again a doyenne of Beijing’s intellectual coteries. Some I’ve never heard of. And Chang Lee – who I’ve heard of somewhere or other, but I can’t remember where.
I stand on the Bund. I wipe the snow off my cap. I look up to see I’m standing right next to a long line of floating brothels – converted from barges and moored to the quay. Foreign sailors, Chinese sailors, foreign businessmen, Chinese businessmen line up in the snow (which is already starting to melt), patiently awaiting their turn. The brothels rock gently in the water. Against their steel hulls roll and rub the corpses of the executed pirates while, a few inches of steel away, live bodies writhe and frenzy in the joys of procreation. Such is war.
Suddenly, crashing his way up one of the gangways, pushing clients and security guards into the water, comes a colossal Scottish seaman, roaring drunk and red hair flying, screaming obscenities to all and sundry through his few remaining teeth. He is finally suppressed by seven Chinese mountains and several of his own shipmates. After a certain amount of slipping and sliding on the snow everyone sits on top of him and cheers – including the sailor. What a fellow! I find him deeply inspiring. What I need to do with all my posh-boy Marxists is not to retreat, apologize, but attack, attack. Just like him. And I have just the person to help me. A man who loves intellectual punch-ups and salty language. The Hebei peasant and noted playwright, Lao Xiang. I must invite him to our classes. He’ll relish it. Then, after half an hour of intellectual brawling between peasant and toffs, I’ll step in between the two as the voice of moderation…
Allowing myself some modest skips (and slips), I hurry back to the ferry.
*
Agnes and Hu and Li Dequan were walking in the opposite direction, towards Agnes and Hu’s apartment. Feng had disappeared off on some errand – probably to haggle with timber merchants to provide cheaper wood for all the homes he was building.
Li was explaining to Hu this idea she’d had. She’d been greatly impressed by what Hu had told her about her long trek with the soldiers from Shanghai. About what she and the other girls had done. There was someone she really wanted Hu to meet as she thought she would be really interested to hear Hu’s story. Would Hu mind if she and this person came to supper this evening at her and Agnes’s apartment and Hu told her her story?
Hu stared at her. Then laughed.
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ she said. Then she shrugged.
‘Why do you shrug?’ asked Agnes.
‘It’s just I don’t like talking about myself,’ replied Hu, blushing.
Spider Girl was walking behind them. Spider Girl was finding it quite hard to live in a city. It wasn’t that she was unhappy with her employers – Agnes and Hu were good people and they turned a blind eye provided she didn’t steal anything too outrageous.
It was the city itself which made her feel uneasy. She didn’t understand it. In her village there wasn’t anyone she didn’t know. In Wuhan there wasn’t anyone she did know. When she passed someone in her village she knew all their past story, and pretty much all their future story. You just had to look at their faces to see which particular part of their story they were presently in. But here in a city every face was blank. It had no past, it had no future. Where did all these strange people come from? Endless streams of them? What did they all do? You walked down a street and all these people you’d never seen before and would never see again kept coming straight at you, streaming past you, never looking you once in the face. Where did they come from? How did they make a living? In her village everyone did something – a
ll the time! It’s how people stayed alive. But In Wuhan no one except for the stall holders and coolies ever seemed to be doing anything. Just walking round and round in circles.
Spider Girl was of course suffering from that fashionable modern urban condition – alienation. Not that she would have the least idea what such a concept either meant or involved. As far as she was concerned, she was just out of sorts.
The three of them, all lost in their own thoughts, walked through a squirl of screaming children ferociously hunting down an even smaller child who’d somehow managed to steal a rice cake. He was desperately trying to stuff it down his throat before they caught him and robbed him of it.
5
Spider Girl was in a bit of a bait. She cooked what she cooked, which was what she and her family had always cooked. And Agnes and Hu had never made any complaint. But now Agnes had told her to cook what she and her family would eat on a feast day, on the day of the village festival. Well, that would be pork. But the pig which the butcher was slaughtering as she approached his stall looked all wrong. It was pink and naked; their pigs had always been brown and hairy. What was more, the meat smelt different to the pork of their family pig. The butcher said rudely that his pork was the finest in Wuhan. She’d been round all the other meat stalls and his meat was definitely the most expensive. Which meant that people were prepared to pay more for his meat – after haggling – than for anyone else’s. Which meant, she reasoned, his really must be best.
So she brought streaky pork from him with a wedge of fat – my how her family had ladled in the fat when it came to a feast! – then went on to buy greens for the pork soup and rice and vegetables for the other dishes.
Not only was the strange pork a problem, but the Wei family had rarely eaten rice. Wheat and dumplings were their staple, but they had occasionally had rice on feast days. Like today, the final day of the Chinese New Year. Spider Girl knew rice was considered more ‘refined’, but had little experience in cooking it. To show her frustration she loudly banged her pots and pans as she cooked and cussed out The Drab she’d hired to help her about the house. The Drab was cutting the vegetables.
Agnes ignored all this pantomime and withdrew to her bedroom to write her weekly article for the Manchester Guardian. She was writing eloquently and bluntly about the medical and refugee crisis facing China and the desperate need for charities and the British government to send aid to Wuhan. Hu sat in her room praying and composing herself for the ordeal of having to talk about herself. Li Dequan had walked to the wealthier Chinese section of Wuhan to escort their guest, Shi Liang, to the apartment.
Shi Liang was noted for her ferocity. From a wealthy background, she’d been the first women ever to graduate from China’s most prestigious law school. By the mid 1930s she had fought her way to the top of the Shanghai legal profession. In 1936 she was sent to jail with six male colleagues for publicly criticizing Chiang Kai-shek’s craven policy of appeasement towards the Japanese. The government, embarrassed to admit that a woman dared to behave in such an aggressive fashion, dismissed the whole event as the ‘Seven Gentlemen Incident’. It was even more embarrassing because Shi was close friends with Chiang Kai-shek’s formidable wife Soong Meiling, with Soong Meiling’s formidable sister Soong Chingling (the widow of Sun Yatsen, the leader of the 1911 Revolution), and with Soong Meiling’s other formidable sister, Soong Ailing, who had married China’s richest banker. The three Soong sisters were the most powerful women in China. Shi Liang knew all about networking!
Shi and Li Dequan entered the run-down apartment. Shi immediately looked round the room and then toured it, viewing the furniture and decorations with the concentration of a general inspecting the cleanliness of a barracks. Petite, square-jawed and with glasses, Shi radiated intellectual power and determination. She stared at Spider Girl, Spider Girl stared back at her.
Spider Girl vowed that she would spit in her soup.
Shi and Li Dequan sat down at the table and continued the conversation they’d been having in the street.
‘The problem,’ said Li, ‘is that while Feng and I have successfully set up one large reception camp in Wuhan for the refugees and are busy building two more, upriver in Chungking, where all the refugees are eventually going to end up, the whole process of preparation is taking far too long. Here in Wuhan we’re allowing the different groups on their different streets three or four weeks to get to know each other, learn to cohere and cooperate as a community, before ferrying them upstream to Chungking. With the fertile soil of Sichuan and Yunnan the groups from farming backgrounds should be able to produce crops within months. Those used to manufacturing and cities should have their new housing and factories ready so they can immediately start work. We should have been sending groups upstream already – so their houses here in Wuhan can be taken by fresh refugees – but we can’t, because no preparation is being undertaken upstream. Feng and I have no influence over the officials and businessmen in Chungking.’
‘You need political muscle and finance,’ said Shi the fixer. ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll speak to Soong Meiling about the politics and Soong Ailing about the finance – put a bit of snap into the process.’
Li Dequan smiled gratefully.
At this moment Hu made a somewhat tenuous appearance. Li introduced her to Shi, who gave her a matter-of-fact once-over, turned her back on her and sat down. Li sat down. Hu, as a Shanghai mill girl unused to the more advanced theologies of table manners, hesitated, then sat down too. Li Dequan explained to Hu that Li was a lawyer from Shanghai. Hu glanced at Li sharply. On the few occasions the workers had managed to organize a strike in their mill to improve their appalling working conditions, the bosses had first sent in lawyers to intimidate them with threats of long prison terms, and then, if that failed, gangsters and goons. But only for a second did the polite and exquisite Hu allow her frown to linger before resuming her modest smile.
Agnes, article finished and despatched by a runner, brought in some wine and sat down with them. The conversation became general – the war, the political situation in Wuhan and events abroad. Spider Girl served the food. Shi Liang seemed unaware that Spider Girl had spat in her soup. None of them seemed to find the pork offensive. But Spider Girl did detect one flicker of disapproval from Shi as she tasted her rice. As was usual for a girl from her province Spider Girl had stirred the cooked rice into the lard she had rendered down from the pork fat. It gave a lovely greasy feel to it. Just right after a freezing day’s work in the fields! Li Dequan, herself a peasant, ate it with much smacking of lips and appreciative burps. Agnes was indifferent to all food. But Shi Liang, from a refined East Coast family, had only ever tasted rice whisked briefly in the subtlest of oils. For one second her lips moued in distaste. Spider Girl noted this and stored it up for future bile.
The meal over conversation turned to the matter of the evening. Li Dequan briefly explained to Shi the story of Hu’s journey from Shanghai to Wuhan. How it might give Shi some solutions to the problems they were wrestling with in high government committees. Hu wondered aloud how her journey from Shanghai to Wuhan could in any way interest or be of use to ‘high government committees’.
Li Dequan turned to her.
‘Dear Hu, let me explain. Our country is in a very difficult position. Not only because of the Japanese invasion, but because our ruling class, our ruling elite, know nothing whatsoever about the people they rule. Isn’t that true, Shi Liang?’
‘It is.’
‘Until now they’ve totally and cruelly ignored us. Suddenly, in order to unite us all against the Japanese barbarians and organize us to fight them, they are forced to discover who we are, how we think, how we behave, how they should speak to us. The story you told me shows how well us ordinary Chinese can improvise, organize ourselves, how we are shrewd, resourceful, responsible, moral people. How, if we are to survive, our government must come to trust us rather than fear us, free us, give us control rather than repress us. Shi Liang has an important role in gove
rnment. She wants to hear your story.’
Hu blushed.
‘Your story,’ stated Shi bluntly, as if she was addressing the High Court in Shanghai.
‘Well,’ said Hu, and started slowly and awkwardly. She told of the burning mill – but didn’t tell of the misery its owners had inflicted on its workforce. She spoke of the defence of the Sihang Warehouse and the little Girl Guide Yang Huimin. Then she told of the meeting in the street as their place of work burnt behind them, the girls’ common decision to dedicate themselves to supporting their soldiers, and gradually, as she spoke, as she remembered her fellow workers, the taxi girls and common prostitutes and mothers who had lost all their families gathering in the street, starting to march with the soldiers and speak to them and help them, it was as though she was again surrounded by them, all their familiar faces and old jokes and common resolutions, and they started to lift her, her spirits, and her face lit up and she started to enjoy her storytelling.
‘Once,’ she said, giggling at the others in the room (being a pious Methodist, she hadn’t drunk a drop of wine), ‘we were all running short of food and supplies, and the enemy were close behind us. It was so funny. We had stopped in this village for the night but had no money. The soldiers said we didn’t have time to explain to the villagers that they should share their food and supplies – the enemy was too close. We’d just have to seize it, violently if they fought back. We saw that the soldiers and the village elders were just shouting at each other. So we girls had an idea. It was so funny.
Wuhan Page 28