Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Su picks her up and cuddles her. Su looks up.

  ‘But now, dear people, she has her parents, her family again. She has us children.’

  Su, carrying the toddler, returns to the line. They all speak.

  ‘You all listened to us, dear people.

  You all listened to what happened to us, dear people.

  Listen now to what you must do if you are going to help us, dear people.’

  One by one the children speak.

  ‘One day I want there to be a knock at the door. I am terrified. I fear another soldier. I go to the door. I open it. It is a soldier. But it is not a Japanese soldier with blood on his sword, it is a Chinese soldier.

  “Hello, little one,” he says, “I have come to protect you.”

  He is strong. He is proud. He smiles at us.

  He does not shout or rave. He has a gentle voice.

  He leans down and he lifts me up with his strong hands and hugs me. “Hello, dear Jiang,” he says.

  He says that he and all the other Chinese soldiers have come to rescue us.

  That they will take us back to our villages and we will be safe and happy.’

  ‘And so, dear people,’ says Su, facing the people, ‘we ask you all to do what you can to support our brave Chinese soldiers so that one day we can all return to our village.’

  From the mouths of babes. They bow to us.

  There is applause for this performance. Warm feelings for the children are expressed by the villagers. An elderly man, obviously the person used to speaking for the village, steps forwards. He thanks them emotionally for what they have said. He says the whole village has sympathy for their suffering. Congratulates them on their courage and on the truths they have spoken. He says all Chinese people must be patriots and fight for their country.

  The villagers then take the children to the temple where they have swiftly organized food for them and a place for them to spend the night.

  Which leaves my would-be playwrights. Each one has been deeply moved by what they have just seen. The walls of class have been torn down. Tian Boqi sits alone by himself, tears pouring down his face. Then he gets up and moves over to his classmates.

  ‘We have all been fools,’ he admits. ‘We must talk among ourselves, debate, so that we too can write drama which can move and motivate people like those children moved us.’

  They do talk among themselves. Not in the way they used to – with sharp tones of point scoring and egotism – but more quietly, more warmly and respectfully, listening to each other, starting to construct things together.

  I have a sudden thought. It is obvious I am not needed any longer by my students. They will decide for themselves what they will do and how they will do it. I follow the villagers to the temple.

  The children are seated around a table being served and feted by the villagers. It is a beautiful sight. I go up to the elderly man who had spoken for the village. I apologize to him for my behaviour, for the behaviour of my students. For inflicting that play on the village. I say that the children have taught us how we should write plays, that we have learnt our lesson.

  He looks at me and smiles wryly.

  ‘I watched your face while your students were making their play. I saw what you were about. You were using our village to teach your students a lesson.’

  I smile. I think.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say, ‘perhaps my students could at some time come and talk with the villagers. That they could bring their new plays down here and perform them before the people and then listen to the peoples’ comments. They are young, they need their advice.’

  ‘I could discuss it with the people,’ says the old man. ‘Explain things.’

  ‘I would be very grateful for that. But,’ I say, ‘that is not the real reason why I came to talk to you.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s about the children. I am from the government. Now I know that the government, among good people, is very often disliked. Distrusted. And quite rightly. It takes often, it rarely gives back. It can do very bad things.’

  He again smiles wryly at me.

  ‘Have you spoken to the children?’ I ask.

  ‘We have spoken to Su, their leader, yes,’ he says.

  ‘It is my job within the government to put on plays that will arouse, move the people towards supporting the government in their fight against the Japanese. That is why I want my students to write good plays. War is a horrible thing, but we must learn to defeat the Japanese. We, the Chinese people, must defeat the Japanese.’

  He looks at me without expression. I continue.

  ‘I know a man who writes poems and songs for children. He wrote the “Fox’s Fur Coat” which a lot of children sing.’

  ‘Ah, I’ve heard that song.’

  ‘He also writes plays for children to perform. The thing is, these children perform a play. They perform a wonderful play. But my friend has wisdom and knowledge which will help them perform even better plays. He has money so that they can be safe and secure in their lives, so that they can buy costumes and swords, so that they can have time to develop more plays of their own, perhaps perform some of his. Do you know what these children are doing tomorrow, where they are going?’

  ‘We have arranged with them to stay with us for several days while they go to nearby villages each day and perform their play. They can eat here each evening and sleep safely.’

  ‘It’s just that I think, instead of perpetually wandering, these children need some sort of permanent security, a home. We can give it to them.’

  He looks at me and smiles.

  ‘You need to talk to young Miss Su. She’s the boss.’

  I thank him.

  After she’s finished feasting I talk to Miss Su. She is sceptical. She likes the way they work now. Artistic freedom, eh! But she agrees to meet Lao Xiang, talk things over with him. I think Lao Xiang is exactly the right person for her to talk things over with.

  I congratulate her on her performance and walk away.

  *

  One thing I have not explained to you is the anxiety I felt when I first saw that raggle-taggle string of children enter the village. How I minutely scanned each individual face. Any one of them might have been one of my children, all of my children, cast adrift, helpless on the tides of war. But none of them were my children.

  I return to the students who are intensely debating future plays and productions. They are talking about writing their next play collectively – dividing up the scenes and speeches among themselves. The lorry is reloaded with the remnants of our props and backdrops. Still talking, the students pile into the back. Except one. Tian Boqi. He looks at me.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  We both climb into the cab with the driver and set off.

  Tian turns and looks at me with that intensity he always stares at people with. I have learnt that he is not always trying to intimidate people when using it, it is his habitual look.

  ‘You asked me why I am always so angry.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I will try to explain.

  By the way, I apologize for the appalling way I have treated you in the past. Especially my comments on the Manchus. They were unforgiveable.’

  ‘Let’s deal with the present,’ I say.

  ‘My anger,’ he says. ‘I was brought up in Tianjin. A typical bourgeois merchant family. Wealthy. I had the best education. But I found the bourgeois life sterile, lifeless, squalid. I could not bear it. My whole country was falling to pieces – starvation, civil war, exploitation – while people lived like this! At university I became a Marxist-Leninist, joined the Communist Party. Various of my plays were performed in Shanghai, Beijing. They were praised. Probably, from what I know now, they were not very good.

  ‘I largely lost contact with my family. They did not approve of me, I did not approve of them. Harsh words were spoken on occasion. Then came the war. As you know Tianjin was one of the first places to be invaded. When I heard I fro
ze. My family! My blood! In danger! I jumped on a train. The train stopped several miles before Tianjin. The Japanese had bombed the track. I jumped off, started walking. I passed people fleeing who said “Do not go there! It is terrible.” I ignored them. It was dark. I entered the city. Moved from doorpost to alleyway, keeping in the shadows. There was screaming, fires, drunkenness. I managed to avoid the Japanese. In the morning I reached my family’s apartment block. I went in. Everything seemed normal. I ran up the large marble staircase to my parents’ apartment. I walked to the door. It was open. I walked in. My family. My grandmother, my father, my mother, my three young sisters and my two younger brothers, several of the servants, all dead, lying there, soaked in blood – shot, bayoneted, their flesh shredded and hacked. Unspeakable obscenities done to my mother and three young sisters. And I had not been there. Why had I not been there? Why had I not been there? If an eldest son was not there to defend his family…? I was so angry. Angry with myself. Angry with everything. Angry with everyone except my family. Lao She, for a while I was so angry I could not think. Then I covered them up. What should I do? Above all I wanted revenge. Should I try and bury them? Give them honourable funerals? How?!? I’d be butchered in the streets. I must have revenge, even if it meant abandoning them. I knew I must think. Calmly, rationally. I must escape. Wait for night. Flee and join the army to kill the bastards. But then I had another thought. Money. My father had a safe. I knew the combination because I had spied on him once when I was a boy. I went to it. They had only been bent on murder and mayhem. It was untouched. So I opened it, took out the money.

  ‘That evening, I slipped out of the city, made it to Shanghai. Went straight to the head of my Communist cell. Gave him the money. Said I wanted a gun. So I could join the fight. Join the guerrillas.

  ‘“No,” he said.

  ‘“What?” I said. “What do you mean? I am going to fight like a devil. I’m going to kill every Japanese dog I meet. Make them pay for the murder of my poor family.”

  ‘“No,” he said. “Tian Boqi, you are far too valuable to the party, the Chinese people, as a playwright, as a propagandist. Anyone can fight, anyone can die. You must write, you must set peoples’ hearts alight. You must make them want to fight and die.”

  ‘I felt so disgusted with myself. Hiding behind my pen. But he was right. I had to write, no matter how angry I felt with myself. So that was what I did. But my anger remained – til today. We have decided – we, the writers in your class – that we must write as those children spoke. To the heart. With action and emotion. And with hope.’

  ‘Don’t forget the dancing,’ I add.

  ‘And the swords,’ he adds.

  ‘You could try sub-machine guns on occasion,’ I add.

  Silence falls. Our lorry arrives at Wuhan.

  Feng Yuxiang is waiting for us. When I tell him what happened his eyes twinkle.

  ‘I always knew you were the man for the job.’

  He drives off with the lorry driver.

  But someone else has also been awaiting our arrival. My companion and fellow writer Lao Xiang. I must tell him about the children, but first he has something to get off his chest.

  He watches my students disembark from the lorry. Notes their quietness, their cooperation as they pick up their props and stage sets to carry them into the university. He addresses them in an unusually restrained manner.

  ‘Had any of you fuckers ever met a peasant before today?’

  They do not answer him.

  ‘I’ll tell you something. Something you must never forget. Just because you’re an intellectual doesn’t mean you’re in any way intelligent. Most intellectuals are unbelievably stupid. I’ve met peasants who are way more intelligent than anyone here. And I include myself and Lao She in that. Do you know how much intelligence it takes to repair a water pump? The intricacy of the mechanism – all the parts of which you have to make yourself? The complexity of holding in your head the exact water levels of all the different water courses in your irrigation system, so that if you shut down the water wheel to repair the pump all the surrounding fields do not flood? Every single farmer has to hold that knowledge in his head. Could you ever fit a red-hot iron tyre around a wooden cartwheel? A cartwheel is a most fragile and complex construction of many pieces of wood, and you have to adjudge precisely when that iron tyre is hot enough to be placed around the wooden rim so that when it cools and contracts it snatches every part of that wooden wheel in on itself so it forms a rock-hard wheel. A farmer must be able to look at a field of growing corn and know precisely where it is flourishing, where it is failing, because he knows the precise history of that field – and know exactly what he must do to cultivate those parts which are failing. You try being a farmer sometime – wankers – you wouldn’t even get past the first blade of grass.

  ‘Always remember: poor people are smarter than rich people. They have to be smarter, because that is the only way they can survive. They don’t have rich daddies to bail them out every time they fuck up.’

  With that we all go home.

  When I reach my room, with dawn breaking, I look out of my window. On a branch of the red persimmon tree growing in my courtyard I see a first scarlet blossom breaking.

  12

  Blood and flies clotted black on the Bund’s flagstones as Hu and Agnes worked at the soldiers’ dressing station, bandaging their wounds, sorting out which might possibly live from those who would definitely die. In the morning Hu always put in a couple of hours working here before going off to sit on her Very Important Committee. She found it kept her sane.

  As they worked Hu unburdened upon Agnes all her doubts and frustrations about working on the committee.

  ‘It doesn’t do any good. It’s like speaking into emptiness. No one listens to anything anyone else says. No one comments or criticizes or agrees with anything anyone else says. It’s not as though there aren’t a few people on it who know about the subject, have really good ideas about housing and what should be done. I talk with them out in the corridor. But they’re the least listened to. The only people the minister listens to are those who fill his ears with flattery and, I suspect, money. Why should I be there instead of somewhere useful like this?’

  Agnes’s weather-beaten, prematurely aged face smiled gently.

  ‘The only people being really effective in the housing crisis,’ said Agnes, ‘are General Feng and his wife Li Dequan with their refugee camps and training programmes, and they’re completely free of the committee and the government – they work through the army and the Soong sisters.’

  While Hu lifted the leg of a soldier on the table Agnes disinfected his wound and deftly wound a bandage round his leg.

  ‘I sometimes think,’ said Hu, ‘that people in the government are being bribed by the landlords to stop any building programme because that keeps property scarce and profits sky high.’ She blushed because she’d spoken ill of people.

  Agnes gave her a wolfish grin.

  ‘Governments are corrupt. Always corrupt. Even in countries like mine, so-called democracies. The businessmen, the financiers move in and bribe the politicians. The politicians pass laws to ensure the rich stay rich, the poor poor. Then, as soon as the politicians retire, they’re given big fat jobs in the companies the rich men own.

  ‘I distrust any top-down organization. Leave it to the people. Supply them with the tools and they’ll do it. Like you in Shanghai. The Young Women’s Christian Association gave you the tools – the introductions to each other, the education, the theory – and you and your friends organized the trade unions on the streets, behind the walls in the back alleys. People organize themselves.’

  She looked into the empty eye socket of the next soldier.

  ‘That was the beauty of the IWW, the Wobblies. Big Bill Heywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill. Every year all up through the Midwest, starting in the south as the crops ripened, then following the harvest north over the Great Plains all the way up into Canada, there were th
ese huge armies of hobos and bums and working stiffs, millions of them, hopping the railroad freight cars from job to casual job. Used to call themselves the Great Black Shadow. And the IWW took them on and helped to organize them so they won decent wages, permanent jobs. It was magnificent. There was violence – company thugs, railroad goons – but they won.’

  ‘You think that could happen here?’ asked Hu.

  ‘It’s why I spend so much time marching with and reporting on the Communist Eighth Route Army. Not because communism doesn’t have its faults. Spent enough time in Russia to know that. But up there in the far north-west the Communist armies can’t use regular bases – too many Japanese around – so instead they have to use guerilla tactics. Go out into the field in small groups, travel at night, attack and then skedaddle. The only way they can survive like that is through the support and knowledge of the country people. The country people fight side by side with them, feed them information and intelligence, help them understand the lie of the land, explain who is to be trusted among them and who not. So the communists, however indoctrinated and regimented they might have been to be the “vanguard”, out in the field have to follow the advice and judgement and will of the people. It is a joy to behold! And peasants make such good, effective fighters. Peasants are the cleverest people on earth.’

  Agnes’s craggy face gave a sad smile.

  ‘Of course, it won’t last. In the end the Japs will win, or the Nationalists or the Communists. What we’re living through here is only a moment. But what a moment! It’s so wonderful just to be alive in it. Seeing human beings for once living up to what they can be.’

  Hu looked at Agnes. She looked so worn, so old despite only being in her forties. That’s what comes from a year’s continual marching with the Eighth Route Army, endlessly reporting and working for the revolution and tirelessly caring for and bandaging the sick and wounded, especially the soldiers who no one else can be bothered with. But just look at her face, thought Hu! Lit by inner light, inner moral compulsion! She’s like someone from the time of the saints!