Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘The enemy was on the other side of the valley – where all the village’s fields were. It was autumn, so all the crops were in the field ready to harvest. Potatoes, onions, beetroot. If we wanted to get sufficient food to feed us and the villagers that night, silent as ghosts we’d have to sneak through the enemy’s lines – girls, soldiers, farmers – and gather the crops. It was an ordinary woman, an intelligent whore, who came up with this idea. Whoever would have thought a whore could be so intelligent? Anyhow, we did it. I’ve never been so terrified in my life.’ Hu suddenly giggled. ‘Creeping through the grass, passing the hut in which all the Japanese were drinking, then, in the moonlight, hugging the ground, all of us stuffing the food into our sacks, our rucksacks, our mouths and bags and pockets. On the way back we were passing through the stream again and suddenly this fat farmer loshed face first into the water. A gurt splash. We froze. The door to the hut crashed open. All these drunken soldiers poured out. I peed myself. They shook their fists and shot into the dark – they couldn’t see us – then they started singing this nasty song and, laughing, falling back into the hut. It was terrifying. One of our soldiers said if they’d still had any grenades he’d have thrown one into the hut. We returned to the village alive, divided up the food. We warned the villagers they should leave, and some of them did. Eating our food, we continued our march. And all that was the result of an intelligent whore having an idea and people listening to it.’

  Hu paused, thinking. There was a glow to her.

  ‘And the wonder of nature, which I had never seen before. The hum of the bees on the flowers, the chatter of the birds in the branches, the cows yielding milk, the raw beauty of the mountains. And everywhere the children singing like bells.’

  Spider Girl stared at her, her face, as Hu relived all the moments of her march. And Spider Girl could not help but compare it with the nightmare and annihilation of her own family’s march.

  Hu looked about her. Were they even listening to her? Shi Liang was staring ahead impassively. Agnes had sloped off to write an article for The Nation. But Li was watching Hu intently. She smiled reassuringly to her. Hu continued.

  ‘We reached this place where the Chinese had prepared lines, trenches, emplacements, to stop the Japanese advancing any further. Lots of troops were manning this front across several miles. Our group of soldiers were ordered to deploy in the centre of the line – which they did. We girls retreated a few miles to a village. We put on some small plays for the children. We dressed some wounds. The villagers were very friendly. Then suddenly this soldier of ours came running back. He told us all the soldiers we’d been with were deserting. Said they far preferred being with us than fighting. That their desertion had immediately put all the other Chinese troops in danger because the Japanese could break through where they had run away. We at once held a meeting about this. We could shame them and shout at them, call them chickens and cowards. But instead we decided to use our feminine wiles and charms to get them back to the front.

  ‘The troops started to arrive. We were ready for them. We’d laid out tables in the village street. Banners. “Welcome to our victorious troops!” Two of us were playing instruments. Some of the taxi girls danced. We even had some weak wine. We invited them to sit down, congratulated them on their great victory, their courage. Said how proud we were of them. They were a bit awkward. How proud their mothers at home would be of their brave sons. We pointed out some children playing in the street. Said how safe they would be now. They started to get very nervous. Then one of them blurted it out. “We ran away,” he said. “We left all those other troops there.” A few voices among the soldiers cried it was the right thing to do, being with girls was much more fun. But most of them were silent.

  ‘“Do you want some food?” asked the intelligent whore. “We’ve cooked some chicken and noodles.” Suddenly the soldiers weren’t hungry. Soldiers are always hungry! A taxi girl asked one to dance. He wouldn’t.

  ‘“Look,” Intelligent Whore said, “we like you very much, you are our friends and some of us are your lovers. We will be here supporting you wherever you are. But if you feel you should be back at the front, fighting beside your fellow soldiers against the Japanese, then that is your decision and your decision alone, and we will completely support you, because we admire you and we will always be here to help you.”

  ‘With that there was no stopping our brave lads. We all drank a toast with the weak wine to a new China and then they all marched back to the front with us cheering them.

  ‘Then we had a good cry – because we realized many of them would not return. Which they didn’t.’

  There was silence.

  Ignoring Hu, Shi Liang looked directly at Li Dequan.

  ‘I can see your point. This girl’s stories demonstrate the intelligence and resilience of the Chinese lower classes. How they should be trusted. And if the poor show patriotism, maybe the rich will be shamed into it too. It’s a clever tactic. One we must utilize if we are ever to produce a united front against the Japanese.

  ‘Tomorrow I have this large fundraiser at Wuhan’s city hall. Many important wives of influential men will be there who I must persuade to donate large sums of money. Mainly for your work with children, Li – especially orphans – but also to start feeding large sums to charities promoting co-ops, farms, manufacturing. It is progressive. Wives must be got to work on their husbands. The money must flow. I want this girl to speak to these women. Tell them her stories so the women can get an inspiring glimpse into the lives of people they don’t know. People they don’t trust. It will loosen their purse strings. Maybe even get them working in charities.’

  Hu sharply drew in her breath. Shi Liang turned to her and matter-of-factly continued, ‘I couldn’t help noticing that when Li introduced me as a “Shanghai lawyer”, you seemed momentarily ill at ease.’

  Hu blushed at her own bad manners.

  ‘It is doubtless very difficult for you to be in the company of people who you think, rightly or wrongly, have caused you so much pain and suffering at your workplace and in your life. But it is your duty, as a Chinese citizen, as a patriot, to put all this to one side and persuade influential people – people who are quite possibly responsible for your own personal suffering – to join the common fight.’

  Hu, through good manners, fought the rising anger within herself at the insufferable arrogance of this woman. She must not behave badly! But her anger would not let her respond to Shi’s brute request.

  ‘I am a patriot,’ Li told Hu. ‘So are you.’

  Again, a silence.

  ‘Hu,’ said Li Dequan gently, ‘your story is inspiring. You must retell it tomorrow to these women.’

  ‘I agree,’ added Agnes, who’d been listening in from the next room.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You’ve got to do it, Hu,’ said Spider Girl, always the sad realist, ‘you have to do it on behalf of all of us who have died.’

  Hu assented.

  Spider Girl cuffed The Drab just to relieve her feelings then swore to herself that if Li Shiang ever came again she’d spit into her soup three times and hire a proper witch to cast some evil spells on her too.

  After the rest had left or gone to bed Spider Girl stayed up with Hu to soothe her feelings. They said some pretty rude things about Shi and rich people in general, but then they started to tell each other stories about their native villages, and Hu laughed a lot. She finally went to bed. Spider Girl alone stayed up.

  As the fireworks and laughter filtered upwards from the streets below, where the citizens of Wuhan celebrated their ancestors and the New Year, Spider Girl stood alone in the silent kitchen, memorializing the events of the past year, thinking of her own family. Only two were still alive. Even if she could talk to her ancestors in their graves – she could not, because she was a thousand miles from them – she reflected sadly that they would not want to speak to either her father or her – the two family members who had destroyed the family. S
he shook with grief. She prayed for her father and his safety. And as she prayed she clung tightly to the small stone bottle which contained the last of her family’s wild pear juice.

  6

  It is a truth rarely acknowledged that writers, all in all, hate each other. A writer only has to hear the most ghostly of rumours of the possible success of another writer for him or her to instinctively and deeply loathe them. This is the plain truth. And yet I, a novelist, am about to proceed into a room full of other writers, mostly playwrights, in order to instruct them on how they must write plays. Am I suicidal?

  Myself and my script-writing comrade Lao Xiang walk down the corridor towards the classroom. My legs feel as if they’re made of India rubber, I walk like Olive Oyl. Lao Xiang, arms akimbo, is spoiling for a fight.

  All through last night my wife’s spirit was stalking me. Relentlessly. Again and again she questioned, doubted my motives, rehearsed to me my moral, my human duties as a teacher. ‘What is the purpose of teaching, husband? How do you teach your pupils, husband? Is the purpose of teaching to start an argument so you can end up punching each other? Is that good? Is that progressive? Or do you run away from them and cry? No! You do neither! What you do is watch them. Not because you wish to study how to overthrow them, teaching is not war, you watch them because you wish to understand them so you can help them, and in helping them you can steer them towards what is best in them, towards doing good things. It is your function to foster, not annihilate. What other possible motive could you have for teaching?’

  With that question from my ever-powerful wife, I grind to a halt. The door to my classroom is right in front of me. I reflect for a few seconds. I turn to Lao Xiang.

  ‘Dear friend,’ I state, ‘I have reached a decision. I am grateful for all your support and your goodness and agreement to accompany me into this lion’s den. But I have decided that I alone must enter, I alone must teach my class.’

  My friend disagrees with me.

  ‘Not fucking likely. I’m with you all the way. Fighting those upper-class cunts.’

  ‘Lao Xiang,’ I say, ‘thank you, but I have decided I must fight my own battles.’

  ‘I could stay outside, in the corridor, just in case there’s a barney.’

  ‘There will be no barney, dear friend. I will find a way through. That is what I am being employed to do.’

  ‘Good luck, brother,’ he says. ‘Fry them in hell.’

  With that he turns and marches back down the corridor. Probably secretly relieved, I think, because he’s on a deadline with at least two scripts.

  I face the door. I walk through the door. I am greeted with a wall of indifference.

  I march to my desk.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say, ‘welcome to the Playwright’s Workshop.’

  I smile and place my papers on the table. I look at my class.

  ‘And how are you today?’

  Some stare out of the window. Others talk languidly among themselves, slouched in their chairs. One individual, large and muscular, sits alone in the front row, glaring up at me, his arms folded in a most aggressive manner. I believe that I am staring at Tian Boqi, the East Coast’s most lauded Marxist-Leninist playwright. He wrote a venomous review of my recent novel Rickshaw Boy. I give him a quick, nervous smile, turn to my notes, start to speak.

  I give them my usual talk. That 97 per cent of our people are illiterate. That therefore speech has to be the medium through which we communicate with them. That there are thousands of different dialects across China, most of which are mutually incomprehensible to each other. That our drama must therefore speak to them through simple actions and universal emotions and images to which they will all instinctively respond. That the natural and practical way of doing this is to adopt the traditional forms of drama and storytelling with which they are all familiar and which they all love – puppet theatre, drum singing, festival plays. New wine in old bottles.

  ‘Of course,’ I add, ‘we must adapt these legends and characters to contemporary events. Liu Bei needs to become our leader General Chiang Kai-shek’ – this is greeted with a few derisory snorts which I ignore (though I agree with them) – ‘and the evil Cao Cao could be easily mutated into the Emperor Hirohito.’

  Tian Boqi continues his basilisk stare at me. I breathe in. As I do a rather ferrety young man, Chu Taofen, slides into the conversation.

  ‘What you say, Comrade Lao, is indeed most interesting. But erroneous. The Chinese proletariat have been deliberately chained for centuries in feudal repression and ignorance, their minds corrupted by precisely these ancient and reactionary fairy tales of handsome princes and beautiful princesses. The Chinese ruling classes have deliberately imposed these superstitious fantasies upon the masses. They must be abolished, swept away so the masses can break their chains and march forwards into the daylight using the clean, logical language and thought processes of Marxist dialectics.’

  I’m about to counter that many of these stories and folk tales, far from being fantastical and escapist, speak directly and powerfully to the reality of everyday life – but before I can another bespectacled young man, Zou Feng, glides into the conversation. Tian Boqi gives me a malicious grin.

  ‘Comrade Chu,’ Zou says, addressing the young man who has just spoken, ‘I think there are certain revisionist errors in what you have been stating about language. Was it not Chairman Stalin himself who recently stated categorically that language has no part in either the base or the superstructure of dialectical materialism? The base of factories and fields and railway engines: the means of production. The superstructure upon it, of people and beliefs and the arts and newspapers and the law. Neither, the Chairman states, bears any relation to the phenomenon of language. Therefore, he states, language inhabits a sort of meta-totemic vacuum entirely outside the whole base/superstructure continuum. It neither of itself produces nor consumes anything. He states irrefutably it is an intermediate phenomenon.’

  He turns to face me directly.

  ‘Do you agree with me, Comrade Lao?’

  Comrade Lao has not understood a word he has spoken. Before I can think of any words to fill my vacuum his fellow tag-wrestler, Chu Taofen, leaps back into the ring.

  ‘But, Comrade Zou, if within the revolutionary dialectic one goes back even further than Chairman Stalin, to 1918, one discovers Chairman Lenin himself stating unequivocally, when challenged by Comrade Klara Zetkin, that all cultural forms and artistic expressions and language within a socialist state must never be allowed to develop in a chaotic or anarchistic fashion. An individual can never become spontaneously liberated by art. Art, he states, is petit bourgeois deviationism – no more, no less. Therefore a truly revolutionary consciousness can only be forged within the norms and disciplines of strictly controlled Marxist-Leninist structure. Only through such a dialectic can individuals and cultural institutions come to fulfill their true revolutionary potential in the construction among the masses of a true socialist consciousness.’

  Before I can intervene Comrade Zou leaps back in.

  ‘Of course, Comrade Chu, but is not your emphasis upon the individual artist in itself a petit bourgeois deviation? It is a fundamental flaw in bourgeois reasoning to constantly present dialectical materialism as an inflexible, impenetrable dogma when in fact it constantly reacts to and readjusts itself within the purposive, ever-changing modalities of materialist existence. Is that not so?’

  What are they rabbiting on about? I feel as though I am drowning in a vat of overcooked noodles. Where do I even start to find a handhold on this conversation?

  ‘On the contrary, Comrade Zou,’ purrs Comrade Chu, ‘in Marxist dialectic are there in fact any insurmountable historical tendencies which serve as starting points as well as obligatory limits to the purposive activity of individuals and social groups within cultural and artistic matrices while those constructs are outside the rational discipline of revolutionary modalities?’

  Before anything more can be said on this sub
ject – whatever this subject is – I hastily move in to quell it, using the language of baffled chairmen throughout the ages.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘thank you both very much for your really interesting contributions. You’ve given us all, I’m sure, a lot of food for thought, but I think it’s time for us to move on and hear from some other voices in the room.’

  Several Marxists speak in varying degrees of comprehensibility. Then an agitated young anarchist speaks his ideas. They are unusual.

  ‘On the question of languages, I believe we should abolish them all. Yes. Every single language all around the world should be abolished. And they should all be superseded by one mathematically based utilitarian system of communication in which every single written word is replaced by a number and every spoken word replaced by electronic squeaks and grunts. True revolutionary consciousness, yes, can only be synthesized when all traditional modes of discourse and communication have been abolished and replaced by cacophony which in turn, yes, will shock the sensibilities of the whole world population into revolutionary new modes of discourse as yet unthought of.’

  I must say, as I listen to him, I’m greatly drawn to the comic potential of his idea. I could use it as the basis for a short story – not, of course, that I still write short stories. As he goes on I manage to keep a straight face. As my wife says, I must first understand my pupils before I can teach them.

  ‘Have you written anything in this new language?’ I ask.

  ‘No, er, it’s all theoretical at the moment.’

  ‘Complete and utter bollocks,’ pronounces Tian Boqi in the front row. A chorus of Marxists echo ‘Hear hear’.

  Throughout this class there’s one young face that has not been scowling or ignoring me. He’s smiled steadily. Delicate featured with lively eyes, he’s followed all the various discussions. I ask him to contribute.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘my name is Chang Lee. I’m from Nanking. I’ve been listening to everyone with great interest. I hope you’ll all forgive me for not adding to the theoretical debate, but I wish to explain to you what I intend to write about, and why I want to write it.’ He blushes briefly. ‘I had a very sheltered upbringing in Nanking. As a boy I was very sickly, so I had to stay indoors with my mother and nurses. I had tutors brought in for my education. I wrote some poems and little plays which people were kind enough to publish and I did attend the performance of one of my plays.’ He blushed again. ‘Anyhow, enough about me.