Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Agnes had helped her out by quickly persuading the informal rickshaw drivers’ collective she’d set up to ferry wounded soldiers to the hospital to also pick up all the bicycle parts Spider Girl had haggled for from the market and carry them to a new workshop that the hospital had rented nearby where the traction frames and pulleys and wires were to be constructed. Hu helped out too by speaking to General Feng Yuxiang and getting him to send two welders and some mechanics from one of his collectives to start assembling the traction units.

  Then, just as Spider Girl was at last about to start cooking the meal – it would have to be hurried – this bizarre foreign lady suddenly turned up and started demanding that she get her a bathtub and some hot water for her to bathe in! She’d been in an aeroplane for eight days! Chop chop! What an extraordinary request, thought Spider Girl. Who would waste their money in Wuhan buying water to bathe in? Buying water fit to drink was expensive enough.

  When Spider Girl appeared recalcitrant, Freda, who spoke awful Chinese, started making a scene. Agnes came out of her room, where she’d been writing chapter five of her new book, Battle Hymn of China, and calmed her down. Freda started sobbing and then explaining she was tired out, and this whole city smelt and was dirty, and why was this servant girl refusing to do what she told her to do and, as this same servant girl was about to start preparing their meal, why were her hands black with grease and oil and mud?

  Spider Girl, though the conversation between Freda and Agnes was being conducted in a foreign language, stood there arms akimbo, staring at this bizarre foreign creature. Every so, often she cuffed The Drab just to relieve her feelings. She had never witnessed such a performance in her life. A grown woman in public behaving and carrying on like a tiny child. Where was her dignity, her self-respect, her self-control? Even Agnes seemed to be getting a bit short with her.

  ‘All I want,’ said Freda, ‘is a bath. A nice warm bath. That’ll settle me, calm me down.’

  A silence followed. Agnes wanted positive journalists to write positive stories out of Wuhan. Freda’s readers in the liberal British News Chronicle were precisely the people in the West that had to be reached if China was ever going to be helped. As always it was going to have to be the working classes that carried the burden.

  ‘Spider Girl, get Freda here a bath – I don’t care from where – and warm water to fill it!’

  Spider Girl stared at her. Agnes was standing a little behind Freda and opened her hands, signalling to Spider Girl that she’d appreciate her cooperation.

  ‘Very well, Agnes,’ said Spider Girl, ‘for you,’ and stumped off.

  As she was walking – her hips and upper legs were killing her – down to the Bund, again, Spider Girl reflected that this woman was behaving as people said all Westerners behave – arrogantly, selfishly, unfeelingly. But then she remembered that Agnes and even more Donald were Westerners, and neither of them would ever think of behaving like that.

  *

  By early evening a disgruntled Spider Girl had through her contacts managed to appropriate a bathtub and sufficient water for Freda to take her bath in and emerge fragrant and newborn from. But the time needed to procure a bathtub and sufficient water for Freda meant Spider Girl had no time left to cook the meal. The Drab could cut vegetables but nothing else. Agnes had to abandon chapter five of the Battle Hymn of China10 and fangle up a meal.

  Agnes, fag hanging from her lower lip, was not a natural cook. In fact she wasn’t really interested in food at all. She was quite happy eating the iron rations that the many armies she’d marched with had relied on. So the meal, when it eventually emerged, was lumpy and only partly digestible.

  Neither Hu nor Donald were there – they were both at the hospital – so while she and Freda worked their slow way through the meal, with Spider Girl muttering from the stove and cuffing The Drab, Agnes tried to explain to Freda how one treated servants in Wuhan.

  ‘It’s not the same in Wuhan as it is in most other places, Freda. Here everyone is involved in the war effort – servants as well as their employers. So service is not always guaranteed. Sometimes the servant is busy doing other, more important things. We’re all fighting for survival.’

  ‘I know, Agnes. I really know. But the thing is – perhaps it’s the way I was brought up – but I do insist that servants must be clean. There’s something deep within me that recoils when I see a dirty servant. I mean, when I was growing up our servants were always immaculately clean. My mother insisted on it.’

  Agnes sighed. Spider Girl had spent half a day lugging around oily bicycle parts and the rest of it extracting Freda’s bath from under a pile of scrap.

  ‘You see,’ continued Freda blithely, ‘I’ve really been in the midst of all sorts of unpleasantness since I saw you last. My life is in turmoil, and it’s taking me a bit of time to adjust.’

  Agnes looked at her without too much patience and was about to say something sharp when mercifully, just as they were about to eat, a bicycle courier rushed in with a message from the Chinese Ministry of Information, saying the Chinese Minister of Information, the Honourable Hollington Tong, was about to hold a news conference where an important announcement was due to be made.

  ‘Oh good,’ said Freda. ‘A government press conference. Gives me a chance to get a sense of the place.’

  ‘The Chinese Ministry of Information will be the last place to get a sense of China,’ replied Agnes. And then remembered Taierzhuang. ‘Well, we’d better go,’ she conceded, ‘they do occasionally have interesting stuff.’

  They departed, leaving Spider Girl.

  Spider Girl carried the uneaten food back to the stove and started to cook it once more – this time slowly, properly, for her and The Drab. As she did so she had a thought. All that water she had had to buy out of the household budget for Freda was still in the bath. There was no commodity in Wuhan more expensive and more scarce than relatively clean water. Relatively safe water you could drink with some confidence that it would not poison you or infect you with dysentery or gastroenteritis. Typhoid even. Poor people could not afford to be too fussy about what they drank. Spider Girl waddled to the bath and tasted Freda’s bath water. It had quite a bouquet from the expensive Parisian soap Freda had been using. Spider Girl calculated she could sell it as European water. The secret water that Europeans drink to stay so much more fit and healthy than their Chinese counterparts.

  And she knew where she could find a whole lot of empty bottles.

  Agnes had not had enough money recently to pay her any wages – though, as Agnes’s slave, she did not in fact have to pay Spider Girl any wages at all. But Spider Girl did not begrudge her this. She knew Agnes had been spending a lot of her money recently buying medical supplies for wounded soldiers on the Bund. Spider Girl thought this good and honourable behaviour. Besides, her own father was a serving soldier who she prayed for continually. But Spider Girl was herself in need of money. She was addicted to lurid Shanghai detective novels and the bookseller on the Bund was by now starting to suspect she stole books from him; his attentiveness whenever she picked up a book meant she now had to pay to read the latest thrilling and bloody adventures of Detective Wang, his glamorous (and dangerous) assistant the beautiful Liu Jingfei, and their supernatural and implacable enemy, the Ghost of the Evil Englishman.

  Perhaps, she thought, with all this wheeling and dealing over bicycle parts, she herself might be able to make some money on the side.

  5

  I take my wife’s scarf from its drawer in my cabinet. Slowly unfold it. Then hold its softness, its gentleness to my face. My head, my lungs, my whole body fills with the warmth and fragrance of my wife, my family.

  And then, as I have taught myself, I fold it up again, place it gently back in its drawer, and shut my cabinet.

  That is all the emotion I allow myself.

  Although I usually return to my room to work, this morning I walk outside into the courtyard and the sunshine and sit on a bench set beneath the leafy c
anopy of the red persimmon tree. Its fruit, still small and green, slowly grows and ripens on its branches. I instruct myself to think about my play, Defend Wuhan, commissioned by our illustrious and worthy leader General Chiang Kai-shek. The difficulty is that the Generalissimo, as a commissioner of the arts, is hardly in the league of the Qianlong emperor or even Lorenzo the Magnificent. His commission to me was neither clear nor coherent.

  I have two meetings today. The second is in the late morning with a government minister, the Minister for Education. It is a purely formal meeting – so that our part of the government machine can let his part of the government machine know what we are doing. I will also try to get from him some funding so that we can start organizing patriotic plays in our nation’s schools. My first meeting is much more enjoyable. Tian Boqi has spent his three days coaching and advising and rousing our latest batch of agitprop students before they go out into the field. We are meeting here beneath the red persimmon tree so I can thank him for his work, wish him luck as he returns to the field, and, more deviously, pick his brains for any tips or help he can offer on writing my Defend Wuhan! masterpiece.

  He approaches, we greet each other with delight (and emotion), sit down, pass through the formalities before getting down to the nitty gritty – Defend Wuhan! I explain the unorthodox commissioning process.

  ‘Keep it simple,’ he advises. ‘It’ll be about what all our stories are about. Average person, good clean-living bloke with a loving wife, realizes he must go and fight the Japanese. At first his wife says no but then, suddenly, she witnesses some Japanese atrocity or something, she is persuaded he must go, insists he must go. She will guard the home. He goes. The play is set here in Wuhan?’

  ‘I think so,’ I say.

  ‘So it should be modern.’

  ‘Ah, modern, yes, you’re right.’

  ‘You need lots of searchlights sweeping round the sky. Martial drums, musical instruments, military tunes, loud bangs, people marching up and down, stirring speeches and patriotic songs and dances.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, but not in the most positive of tones.

  Tian Boqi looks at me.

  ‘Dear Lao, this is war. War is not the most subtle of phenomena. It is not Percy Bysshe fucking Shelley. War is nasty, brutish and degrading. But this one has to be fought. The basest human emotions must be unleashed, so that sometime, in the future, when we have destroyed this evil, as artists we can once more start to kindle and arouse the finest, the noblest, the most beautiful of human emotions and ideas. Just like Percy Bysshe fucking Shelley.’

  We both contemplate this for a while. Tian continues.

  ‘Look, this is set in Wuhan? So the bloke, the hero, is presumably from Wuhan?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say.

  ‘And all the audience will be from Wuhan. Even if they’ve only been here a few weeks or months. Everyone in that audience will have experienced something uplifting, extraordinary, unique about living in Wuhan, because Wuhan, in these few short months, has been, is an extraordinary place to live. The whole audience will know that. So you need the hero – who can wax eloquent every so often even though he’s an average down-to-earth bloke – to speak out with passion, with joy about all the special and wonderful qualities – which the audience will recognize and empathize with – of living in Wuhan. The spirit, the dedication, the inspiration, the change. Which he must now leave, and take some of it with him, to go and fight the Japanese. Cue tears. Farewell to his wife. Lots and lots of tears. And the audience all deciding they will live and fight even harder for their beloved China.’

  That final bit, about Wuhan, its special qualities, I will definitely put in.

  I pause.

  ‘It’s strange,’ I say, ‘here I am, putting on this play, about ‘defending Wuhan’, and yet everyone, every single person in that audience, will know, despite all the official statements, that we will be leaving extremely soon, that it will be falling within months to the Japanese.’

  ‘So? When we get to Chungking, put on the same play renamed Defend Chungking. You are not talking about just Wuhan in this play. You are talking about China. China marching into the future.’

  *

  We part, I catch the ferry across the Yangtze and walk along the Bund to meet my government minister.

  On the way I drop into the central post office to see if there has been a letter for a Mr Wu Lei, from my wife. Nothing.

  I breathe out. Walk out on to the Bund again. Breathe in. Everyone is very busy. Everyone is moving with purpose. I move with purpose too, observing as I go. There are few destitute people, even fewer dying or dead. Ships – both passenger and freight – are bustling in and bustling out – always fuller when they depart than when they arrive. And people are looking cheerful!

  This all makes me feel very positive, very progressive. Evolution and improvement are all about me. As Tian Boqi said – ‘China is marching into the future!’

  I am about to meet Mr Chen Lifu, the Minister of Education. He has a rather odd reputation. Originally a mining engineer, Chiang Kai-shek plucked him from obscurity (a bit like me) and, only a few weeks ago, appointed him his Minister for Education. A strict Confucian, Chen has the reputation of favouring a traditional and hierarchical form of society. His first act as Minister of Education was to order all China’s universities and scholars to remove themselves to the remotest parts of the country in order to escape the Japanese. Quite a good idea in itself. But this was not to safeguard our scientific and technical expertise – vital to our war effort – but rather to preserve our venerable traditions of Chinese scholarship and culture from the pollutions and barbarisms of modern Japanese and Western ‘thought’. Personally I have never had any doubt that our ancient intellectual and humanistic traditions – the oldest and finest in the world – would ever be seriously threatened by crude fascist ‘thought’ or crude Western ‘culture’. We are too civilized and tolerant for that. But I have not come to challenge the minister, just to make contact and ask for some funding.

  His room is simply and modestly furnished. He wears the plain blue robe and hat of a traditional Chinese scholar. It’s as though the Revolution of 1911 has never taken place! He looks me sternly up and down. I must admit I have not dressed for this interview, I am my usual sloppy self.

  I make my greetings. I explain what I and my department are trying to do at the university. I explain that I would like to extend our programme of education and promotion of fighting the Japanese to our schools and inform him we will require some funds for this.

  He does not respond. Just stares at me.

  I get a bit uneasy. I explain our work is vital for the war effort. For reforming our society so that we can better defeat the Japanese.

  I stop. There is a silence. He speaks.

  ‘I have read some of your books.’

  Never a good sign.

  ‘I found them disturbing and unpleasant,’ he says. ‘I do not think authors should write degrading books about prostitutes. Women – and men – of loose morals should not be allowed in books.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘But I liked that book about the rickshaw driver even less. It appealed to and celebrated the basest instincts in humanity – greed, ambitious social climbing, more loose women, humans who only care about money and power. That is not reforming a people, that is undermining and destroying the harmony and hierarchy and delicate balance of a healthy and functioning society. It brings in its place chaos and anarchy and intense human suffering.’

  ‘I was not trying to put forward the merits of greed and capitalism, but rather…’

  He speaks over me.

  ‘Capitalism is the lowest and most base form of society possible,’ he informs me. ‘Even more debased than Marxism. The merchant classes are always the most treacherous and unstable elements in any society. Minds wholly preoccupied with personal material gain, with no interest in the stability or well-being of the society they live among. They constantly bring chaos an
d collapse to every society they infest. Just look at the destruction and decay caused to our China by the actions of the foreign imperialists and bankers. They have so undermined and impoverished our society they have made it impossible for us to defend ourselves.’

  He rests a moment. I am not too sure what we are disagreeing about. We seem to agree on quite a lot of things. He continues:

  ‘I always think the finest, most subtle solution to the natural mendacity and treachery of the merchant classes was that imposed by our greatest and wisest emperors. Firstly they imposed upon our country a stern and uncompromising social hierarchy. And they then composed that hierarchy in such a way that the merchant class was always placed just below that of hermits and ascetics. When, by greed and deviousness and rapacity, a merchant had risen to the top of his class, he was automatically promoted by the emperor to the next class – that of anchorites and eremites. Having first given away all his money and worldly possessions, he then had to spend the rest of his existence living off crusts of bread and rainwater in a remote cave atop an almost unscalable mountain. Any merchant who managed to survive the climb to the top was then strongly advised, if he valued his life, to never attempt to climb down again. That, I think, provides the finest antidote possible to the ambitions of the merchant classes.’

  There is a comic short story in that. I must remember it. I think I am warming to him.

  ‘Well, I think we agree about quite a lot there,’ I say.

  ‘We don’t agree about anything,’ he rejoins icily. ‘You are a socialist. A wishy-washy progressive, and liberal who believes in a whole lot of inconstant and ever-changing values. You want to take away society’s anchor and mainstay – a strong and organic hierarchy – and in its place install a vapid and vacuous personal morality of general equalness and do-goodery, a making-it-up-yourself philosophy in which no one knows where they are or what their place, meaning or function is, and in their disorientation allow the most immoral and rapacious among them – through demagoguery and bribery and violence – to seize control of all things and to rule like wolves!