The Yellow Papers

by Dominique Wilson

  ‘You’ve bought nothing but forgeries, my boy! Not worth a fragment of what you’ve paid, I’d wager. Don’t you know that if it’s for sale in the open, it’s probably fake?’ And he’d explained about the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Objects that had been established three years previously, but how it was still possible – if you had the right contacts – to smuggle genuine antiques out of the country. ‘I can see I’m going to have to introduce you to some of my friends …’

  These new contacts enabled Edward to meet with some of Shanghai’s upper-class mandarins who had previously shown no interest in this white barbarian with no culture. But on hearing he was interested in buying Chinese artefacts, they now invited him to dinner parties and soirées, and sometime in the evening he would be offered exquisite jades or bronzes.

  He also met with tomb-robbers and middlemen, and bought statuettes which had been looted from Mongolian and Tibetan temples, or from burial grounds that had been ploughed up when the railway lines were being built, exposing treasures that had been buried for thousands of years. He felt no qualms about buying such artefacts – after all, the tombs, temples and graves had already been plundered, and better he buy these things then let them go to some other collector.

  Often, after a particularly successful transaction, he’d joined a group of revellers down the Rue Chu Pao-san – or Blood Alley, as it was commonly known – where within its short length some two dozen bars stayed open all night long, and prostitutes to satisfy any man’s fancy plied their trade, and he’d mingled with drunks and soldiers and sailors on shore-leave in places like the ‘Frisco, the Crystal and George’s Bar, where Russian women had clung to him with a litany of Darlink, you buy me one drink, yes? as they’d swayed to the wail of saxophones until dawn.

  But his favourite place of all was The Great World, that yellow pinnacled building on the corner of Yanan and Xizang roads that seethed with life and noise and disorder, where you could tell which floor a hostess belonged to according to the split of her cheongsam. He could spend whole days amongst the theatres, peepshows, pimps and earwax extractors, and he’d never get bored. He’d even spent hours watching scribes sitting under a huge stuffed whale, writing love letters for a fee. Would anyone in Australia believe him if he were to explain that The Great World even provided a gap in its rooftop parapet, so that Chinese gentlemen who had lost all their money on a floor below could jump to their death?

  Yes, life in Shanghai was more wonderful and exciting then he’d ever imagined. Where else you would find so much freedom, so much acceptance, such an exotic blend of opium traders, aristocrats, entrepreneurs, whores and beggars? Only the hundreds of bodies littering the street each morning – beggars and refugees who’d died during the night – dampened his enjoyment. But by mid-morning the municipal carts would have been around collecting them, and he could pretend for a while they had never existed.

  Recently a Christian evangelist had said: If God lets Shanghai endure, He owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah. Edward had laughed when told this, but had to agree with the man. Never had he felt so alive! Never had he seen such hedonism, such self-indulgence – and he’d loved every minute of it. No, Edward decided, the China he’d just experienced as a 24-year-old man would be very different to the China Chen Mu remembered as a 9-year-old boy.

  He leaned forward in his chair and poked at the fire burning in Chen Mu’s fireplace, then added another log.

  ‘I’m sorry, Master Edward, did I doze off?’

  ‘No, no – not at all. It’s me – I was just thinking …’

  ‘I always found this weather favourable to reflections. But tell me, what about your trip? Was it successful?’

  ‘I think the Museum will be pleased. I found a wonderful bowl shaped like an opened lotus flower, with this thin brass rim. It’s very old, I think. Pretty sure it’s Lung-ch’üan ware from the Sung Dynasty. Beautiful! Also a bronze – a gilded mirror-stand shaped like an ox – Yuan, I think – very beautiful. A few other bits and pieces.’

  ‘ Already I believe you know more about China than I do. But then I was so young …’

  In the fireplace, a log cracked, sending sparks up the chimney. Chen Mu pulled the woollen shawl tighter around his shoulders.

  ‘ Are you cold, Chen Mu? Would you like me to bring in more wood?’

  ‘No, no – I’m fine. But I should make a fresh pot of tea.’ He rose and took the pot into his kitchen.

  Edward stood and looked at the books on Chen Mu’s bookshelf. Pulled one out, flipped a few pages, replaced it. Removed a book in red leather binding titled The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He opened the front cover and read Samuel Clemens’ inscription. It surprised him, for Chen Mu had never mentioned knowing him.

  ‘You knew the man?’ he asked when Chen Mu returned with a fresh pot.

  ‘Briefly, a lifetime ago. He took an interest in the Education Mission. Master Edward, I’m sorry, but would you mind getting that wood after all? I think I’m getting too old for this weather …’

  Edward replaced the book and went outside. Soon Chen Mu heard the fall of the axe. He thought about Edward, now curator of Chinese antiquities for that important museum in Sydney – he could probably teach him a thing or two about China, but that wasn’t so bad – in the sixty years since he’d left his village, the world had changed. Even he wouldn’t recognise his own village, had he the opportunity to return – which, unlike old Yu Ping in Silverton so long ago, he had no desire to do. But he felt Edward was hiding something – what did he get up to, in Shanghai, that he didn’t want him to know? Had he tried the tears of the poppy? Probably. From what Chen Mu remembered, the Westerners of Shanghai enjoyed smoking opium. And he was sure Edward would have visited the brothels – what young man didn’t? Chen Mu smiled, remembering the ones that had so fascinated him and Xi Tang when, as two small boys, they had trawled the city for a glimpse of prostitutes. That was probably it – Edward was a virile young man, he was bound to have explored these delights. But did he think Chen Mu so old, so staid, that he wouldn’t understand these experiences? He too had been young, once … He chuckled, imagining Edward’s expression, should he ask: And the prostitutes – did you find them satisfying? But maybe something else bothered his friend …

  ‘Are you all right?’ Edward asked as he stacked the newly split logs beside the chimney, mistaking Chen Mu’s chuckle for a cough.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just remembering … But sit down, Master Edward. I too have a gift for you.’

  He went to the bookshelf and took down a black lacquered box decorated with dragons. It had been a gift from Edward – the first of many – when first at Oxford. Later, when he had learned a little more about artefacts, Edward had shamefacedly apologised and explained that it was not, as he had first thought, Chinese, but only one of the many Victorian Chinoiseries that flooded the English street-markets. Chen Mu had known this all along, but to him its value did not lie in its authenticity.

  Back in his armchair Chen Mu removed the lid from the box. He withdrew a packet of letters tied with string – each from Edward, covering all the years he’d been away, first to boarding school, then university, and more recently in Sydney – and put them on the small table by his chair. Then he removed a sheet of notebook paper and unfolded it. Edward had slipped it under Chen Mu’s cottage door the day of Sahira’s funeral, after Chen Mu had ignored him when he’d tried to give it to him at the gravesite. It was a drawing of a woman with long dark hair and huge angel wings, looking down from the cloud on which she sat. Looking up at her was a man, obviously Chinese. At the bottom of the page, in a childish hand, were Chinese characters. The boy had meant well, and he’d drawn the only ones he’d known how to write at the time – ‘four flowers’ and ‘double happiness’.

  Next came a letter from Dawson’s solicitor, advising Chen Mu of his bequest. A small silk pouch containing Sahira’s wedding ring. A newspaper cutting now yellowed with age, dated April 21, 1910 – it reported the death
of Mark Twain, aged 74. Then a small box.

  ‘Here, this is what I want to give you.’

  Edward took the box and opened its lid. ‘I remember this!’ He carefully removed the lotus-shaped brush-rest from its silken nest. ‘How I loved it as a boy! I thought it the most beautiful thing in the world.’

  As of old, he placed it in the palm of his hand and went to the window to hold it up to the light. For a moment he became the small boy he had been, back in Chen Mu’s cottage, hiding from Winnie. How he had loved this little brush-rest!

  Instinctively he repeated his gesture of long ago, gently stroking each segment, each individual seed head, then tracing the edge of the leaf. ‘It’s still very beautiful …’ he said quietly. He couldn’t explain why, but right now, he felt like crying. He took a deep breath and turned towards Chen Mu.

  ‘Ying yù – ‘hard jade’ or jadeite – the real thing,’ he said, suddenly brisk and business-like. ‘Did you know it can’t be carved? People think these are carved, but they’re wrong. Patterns can only be worn away by abrasion, using hard sand pastes. Can you imagine how laborious it must have been to make something like this? It can break, of course, with enough force, but not easily. No wonder its symbolism …’

  Chen Mu knew Edward was showing off, but it amused him to play along.

  ‘Its symbolism?’

  ‘Power, status, prestige—’

  ‘I prefer its other meanings.’

  ‘I’m not sure what—’

  ‘Some say it was born during a storm, others that it’s crystallized moonlight from the holy mountain,’ explained Chen Mu, paraphrasing Confucius. ‘Its gentle smoothness suggests charity, its fine texture wisdom. While firm, it will not wound, suggesting duty. Its flaws do not hide its excellence, nor does its excellence hide its flaws – just as with truth and loyalty. As such, it possesses the five essential virtues: compassion, courage, justice and wisdom … And, of course, modesty.’

  ‘Ouch! Touché.’

  Chen Mu chuckled. ‘I’ve always considered it my most valuable possession. Which is why I want you to have it.’

  ‘Thank you, Chen Mu! But are you sure? You’ve had it such a long time …’

  ‘It was given to me by my tutor, as you know, before I left my village – a symbol of my potential, they said. I would have given it to my eldest son, but as it is, I want you to have it. A symbol of your potential … It could not possibly go to anyone else.’

  ‘I’m honoured, Chen Mu. I’ll treasure it.’

  Chen Mu nodded. ‘I know you will.’

  Once more Edward ran his finger along the conical seedpods. He was deeply moved, and the thought came to him that Chen Mu was getting old, and would not be around for many more years. But Chen Mu had always been, in Edward’s mind, the one stable factor in his life. What would he do when his old friend was no longer here?

  ‘And did you know,’ Chen Mu said quietly, as if guessing Edward’s thoughts, ‘that there are even some who believe jade bestows longevity?’

  12

  Edward sat nursing his Manhattan, fighting boredom by observing the others in this room. He’d been coming to China for close to eight years now, but in all that time, not much had changed. The rest of the world might be in another depression – the Great depression, they were calling it now, to differentiate it from the one before the Great War – but here, you wouldn’t know it; it was business as usual in the ballroom of the Cercle Sportif Français, the most luxurious club in Shanghai.

  Across from the elliptical sunken dance floor a young Chinese movie idol was arguing with a European man twice her age. He, in turn, seemed unmoved by her pleas, her tears or her tantrum. At the table next to them two overdressed American matrons were ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the stained-glass ceiling window shaped like the bottom of a boat, while eavesdropping on the movie idol’s performance. At other tables and on the dance floor, too-thin women in too-fashionable dresses danced and flirted with too-rich men. From the theatrical art deco balconies, Chinese gentlemen in Western suits shared a table and minimal conversation. Sitting behind them, their breast pockets bulging, their Russian bodyguards counterfeited anonymity.

  The Cercle Sportif Français was the only club that allowed women – though never more than forty – and a few well-to-do Chinese. This made it one of the most popular in Shanghai, and the city’s crème de la crème gathered here. But Edward was not impressed by the dramas that were part of the status quo. Since that first trip here nearly eight years ago, his attitude had changed. He blamed Chen Mu’s little jade brush-rest for this change.

  He’d gone to visit Chen Mu with an arrogance that now shamed him – how proud he’d been of his academic knowledge, his travels outside of Australia, his exploits in Shanghai! He’d thought to impress Chen Mu with his worldliness, his knowledge of stones and techniques, his experience of ‘real life’, as he then called his first month in China. And as soon as he’d entered Chen Mu’s cottage he’d realised these things would not impress his old friend, but still he’d persisted. Then Chen Mu had given him the brush-rest, as he would to a son, and with it an indication that there were different kinds of knowledge, different kinds of being.

  That night, back in his old room at Walpinya Station, Edward had looked at the little brush-rest and felt ashamed – though he had trouble pinpointing what, exactly, he had to be ashamed of. He realised how quickly, how easily he’d adopted the Imperial attitudes of the Shanghailanders – but why not? Shanghai may be an exotic city, but it was also ultra-modern and opportunities abounded. Why not take full advantage of what it offered? He had the education and finances to do so. After all, would Shanghai be so well developed if not for the Westerners? Yet even as he’d thought this, he’d felt uneasy, though he hadn’t been able to put into words the reasons for those feelings.

  The next time he was in Shanghai, Edward had received a letter from Chen Mu, at the bottom of which was – as always – a quote. This time Chen Mu had chosen from the Analects of Confucius. Edward read: ‘If a student is not eager, I won’t teach him; if he is not struggling with the truth, I won’t reveal it to him. If I lift up one corner and he can’t come back with the other three, I won’t do it again.’

  Was Chen Mu trying to tell Edward that he was disappointed with him – that he’d hoped Edward would have learned more from his trip? Or was this just a coincidence? He had, after all, given him the brush-rest. But hadn’t he also said ‘A symbol of your potential’? Potential. Not success, not accomplishments. Just potential. Had Chen Mu seen through Edward’s bravado? Guessed many of the things Edward had not said? Was this why he had chosen this quote? The idea that Chen Mu may be disappointed in him was troubling …

  From then on, each time he came to Shanghai, Edward spent more time simply wandering the streets and less time in the clubs. He took long walks through the Concessions with no set objective, and through the Old City without a guide, though everyone told him he was gambling with his life. And he detoured from the grand boulevards with their shade trees and skyscrapers into the narrow alleyways jutting off them, where human faeces floated to the river via open drains, and laundry of every colour jutted out of windows on bamboo poles, and he made a point of striking up conversations with the people he met there. And when he wrote to Chen Mu, he described what he had seen and what he had learned. But still there were times when he felt something was missing. That though he now spoke not only Mandarin, but many of the various dialects, and spent many an hour talking with factory workers, rickshaw pullers, beggars and street vendors, labourers and soldiers, he would never be able to touch the heart of this country.

  Over the years he’d travelled to places outside Shanghai as well, to Nanking and the Forbidden City in Beiping, where he’d examined the jades and bronzes, and to Soochoo where it was said the most beautiful women in China were to be found. And he’d visited a silk factory in Wushi some time back, where small girls burnt their fingers dipping for cocoons in vats of boiling water, and stood all d
ay in their own urine because they were not allowed a moment to go to the toilet. ‘When one of these little girls looked up at me and smiled – so shyly that I wondered, for a moment, whether she had, indeed, smiled,’ he wrote to Chen Mu, ‘I found I could only turn away in pity at their condition, and felt ashamed of myself for doing so.’

  But since the Mukden Incident, then the fall of Beiping, he’d been more cautious. The Shanghailanders may act as if the Sino-Japanese war was of no concern to them, but Edward felt it was all going to blow wide apart very soon. You could feel it in the air, see it in the faces of the hundreds of refugees that swarmed into the city each day.

  ‘It’s too dry. Take it back – I don’t want it!’

  The sharp voice of a woman at the next table snapped him out of his reverie. The Chinese waiter bowed and took away the plate, and as he passed Edward’s table Edward saw the untouched meal – roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and a mountain of vegetables. It snapped him back to the Sydney he’d just left, where jobless men laboured at useless municipal projects, and queued outside hotels waiting for rubbish bins tightly packed with hotel refuse. He’d seen them up-end the contents on a sheet of newspaper and carefully divide amongst themselves the scrapings of mashed potato stained with tea leaves, the fat from corned beef or the chop bones with just a fragment of meat still attached, and the blobs of whipped cream now curdled and permeated with coffee grounds. It occurred to him then that the lives of those men were very similar to that of the Chinese he saw here in the streets every day, and that the more he observed the Shanghailanders, the more he saw them as spoilt children living in a bubble of unearned privilege.

  But still he craved their company.

  A shrill burst of laughter caught his attention; it could only be Olivia, the wife of his friend Jonathan Springwell, whose fortune lay in cotton.

  ‘Edward darling! Have you been very bored waiting for us?’ Olivia sashayed to his table and offered her cheek for his kiss. Following was Jonathan, accompanied by a Chinese couple dressed in Western style, whom Edward did not know.