All Is Given

by Linda Neil

  Ah! A singer of your own songs – a singer-songwriter. Une chanteuse-compositrice.

  That sounds altogether too grand for me … une compositrice. Ooh là là. La-di-da! Anyway, at the moment I’m not doing anything really. I am just sitting at the window looking out and listening.

  I told him about the night before.

  Oh! Amélie Poulain. The number of girls that came to Paris with those haircuts, mooning around Montmartre waiting to be lovestruck. Or men looking for French girls who look like her. Sacré bleu! Makes me sick. Paris is not just sweet and nostalgic like eating this crepe in the shadow of Notre Dame. It is grit and work and difficulty. Century after century of it. So we can have this pretty shiny city today. We’ve fought hard for our sweetness. We’ve cut off the heads of kings for these fantasies.

  I waited while he got his rant out of his system. Eventually he calmed down and we began heading up to Pont Marie.

  Anyway, standing at your window is a very good place to be. Listening is good too.

  He looked me over again as if he was trying to read me. I smiled and spoke through a mouthful of crepe. But you still can’t categorise me, right?

  He smiled in response. Ruefully. Give me time.

  You’re running out. We’re nearly there.

  So, he began shyly. What you’re saying is you don’t want to see me again. Is that correct?

  I giggled. Yes, I actually giggled. He was such a sweet rogue and he brought out the rogue in me. I’m just hoping you’re not going to ask me if I’ve got a Parisian lover yet.

  Ooh là là … Why do you think I’m going to ask you that? No. Don’t answer. Let me use my powers of deduction to guess. You are a woman on your own in Paris and so naturally you are in the market for a boyfriend. Some would consider it their duty as Frenchmen to make sure lonely women are … assisted. It’s just chivalry.

  I’m not lonely. I am alone, but I often find I am not lonely. I am always ready to meet the world. Besides, as my mum used to say, I have other things on my mind.

  He looked at me hard then, as if he were peering right through me. Yes. I can tell … that if you didn’t want to be, you would not be alone. He beamed, elfish again. And I see your mother was right. You have many things on your mind. Many beautiful things. Anyway, for your information, I wasn’t going to ask you if you’d found your Parisian lover yet.

  Good.

  Really?

  Yes, really.

  Most women want to be seduced. Most men want to seduce. That little scenario is like a happily co-dependent couple dancing through time.

  There’s more of a chance to get to know you without seduction.

  He grinned. Interesting angle … for many, seduction would be a way of getting to know someone.

  We both laughed. Our conversation was like the sharp easy exchange of rhythm, meaning and melody that musicians sometimes make, enabled by listening and flow and a kind of inherent sensitivity to the other. Which is another way of saying that we were beginning to make some kind of beautiful, and quite unexpected, music together, swinging our instrument cases as if they were as light as feathers while we walked over Pont Marie across the sparkling Seine, up towards Rue de Rivoli.

  We were still laughing as we arrived at the bus stop just near Saint-Paul.

  This is me, then.

  He stood back, his eyes quizzical. This most certainly is you. I don’t doubt it. But who or what that is, I can’t quite put my finger on … yet. He looked at me intently again.

  My bus, I meant. I felt shy at his gaze but not threatened in any way.

  We both ummed and ahhed for a few seconds in a flurry of mutual, delighted embarrassment brought on by a shyness I couldn’t understand. A moment or two passed before he broke the awkwardness.

  Anyway, what I was going to ask is if you have found a Parisian guitarist yet.

  I laughed. In relief. And then laughed some more in delight and recognition. Perhaps he was a kindred soul, this mischievous-spirited man.

  No … I haven’t. I usually play alone. But you’ve surprised me. I didn’t expect that. Most people look at my violin and ask if I’ll play with them. Not if they can play with me … if you get the difference.

  Vive la différence, mon amie. I’m curious to see what you do.

  Still want to categorise me then?

  I would be honoured.

  My bus arrived. I didn’t say anything as I got on and found a seat next to an open window. Fabian was smiling as he looked eagerly in my direction, waiting for me – willing me, perhaps – to lean out of the window and call out something significant as a way of saying au revoir. Instead I threw out some of the most clichéd words in the world, ones I’d heard a million times in films and television shows. Or read in countless books about love and adventure and chance encounters. Words which, up to that point in my life, I’d never had a chance to say to anyone.

  Same time, same place. In two days’ time!

  The bus was pulling out when the meaning of my words slowly dawned on Fabian’s face. He waved and bowed and mouthed some words in a singular, seamless flourish, which was something like a particularly unexpected and unique phrase of music.

  I’ll be there. I will be there. Wouldn’t miss it for the world! He laughed as he mouthed the words, trotting beside the moving vehicle, his guitar case grasped in one hand, the other waving at me, as the bus to Ménilmontant turned and joined the Parisian peak-hour traffic, heading up towards what suddenly and equally unexpectedly felt like home.

  Revolution at the Peace Hotel

  One Sunday afternoon in November 2011, about two weeks before I was due to leave Shanghai, I went to high tea at the Peace Hotel with my friends Sue and Gerard. They were in town for a few days and having high tea was the kind of thing they did. Not me. Not usually anyway. I was living on a budget: most nights in Shanghai I would either cook in the tiny kitchen in my room or eat around the corner from my hotel in Zhongshan Park at the Uyghur Restaurant. This was a cultural as well as a culinary experience. The Uyghurs, Muslims from the north-west of China, were sometimes considered troublesome by the authorities. Despite this, their food was very popular in Shanghai – among expats, Shanghainese and travellers. It was cheap, oily and very very tasty. It was also markedly different from the usual Cantonese-style cuisine available in many restaurants in the area. I favoured the spinach and garlic dishes, the fried egg with tomato, the chilli cucumber and yoghurt, the traditional flat bread baked in a clay oven on the footpath and the buttery boiled rice.

  It was the type of food I would never eat back home, where I lived on a mostly vegan diet. But I had abandoned my pristine habits for the pleasure of walking out of the hotel lobby, especially as the nights became colder, heading down Huichuan Road, rounding the corner and arriving at the small, grimy restaurant with its slightly acrid smells and warm chaos. I loved the large family who ran the place – the plump, partially veiled matriarch, and her young son, with whom I would play a few squealing games of hide-and-seek as I waited for my food to be prepared in what would never be deemed an hygienic kitchen back in Australia. I loved the Afghani-influenced music playing on their radio speakers all night; the mischievous, instinctive swaying of hips in time with the drumbeat that sometimes overtook us all; and the intricate mime I developed with the waiters, young men from the Uyghur provinces who spoke neither English nor much Mandarin, but a kind of hybrid Urdu.

  High tea at the Peace Hotel was something else altogether. It was scrupulously clean for a start, and there was definitely no hide-and-seek happening on its shiny marble floors. The atmosphere was resonant of colonial days. Still, it wasn’t only westerners who filled the plush high-tea area on the Sunday afternoon I met Sue and Gerard there. Along with the well-heeled tourists and expats were many Chinese, obviously wealthy, some of whom were clothed in the ostentatious designer gear – the kind with brand names prominently
displayed – that seemed all the rage in Shanghai then.

  The high tea was an elegant spectacle: the waiters and waitresses costumed like servants, the opulent decor superbly detailed, and the maître d’hôtel hovering like a director around his beautifully postured actors. After being in the country for two months, it was clear to me that the Chinese were brilliant at form and aesthetics. You only had to sit through one of the lake performances overseen by the award-winning director Zhang Yimou – I’d seen two, each of them perfect – or recall the awe-inspiring pyrotechnics of the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony to understand the country’s gift for precision and order. At the Sunday afternoon high tea, the staff manufactured the kind of serenity that the old colonial powers liked to conjure up in these establishments. And despite the convulsive previous century, the Chinese showed at the Peace Hotel one of the things they do best: creating a sense that everything was in its proper place, that there was nothing to worry or protest about. The tea would arrive hot, the cakes fresh; the chatter would remain barely audible; the hierarchies in place were working for everyone; and all would be well in the world.

  During the afternoon, I sipped English breakfast tea and nibbled on petits fours, occasionally dipping into the conversation between my friends, who were experienced travellers. They were discussing the recent stand-off between Qantas management and its employees, an industrial brouhaha that had made the news even in China. Sue and Gerard were on the side of management, describing the rolling strikes that had preceded the shutdown as ‘death by a thousand cuts’. I’d been following the saga on CCTV, one of the two English-language news channels available at my hotel, but that afternoon I was more interested in the young woman playing the guqin in a corner of the room. The guqin is a traditional Chinese stringed instrument that is plucked and strummed as it lies lengthways across the instrumentalist’s lap. Even though it was made of wood and metal, this guqin was balanced gracefully across its player’s lap as if it were made of silken cloth. The musician had a pretty, soulful face that matched the kind of music she was playing. I was entranced – with the sound of the instrument, with the musician, and with how this elegant detail fitted into the high-tea experience.

  The musician looked up and noticed me noticing her. We smiled shyly at each other, and nodded. I used to play background music on afternoons such as these, in my days as a freelance classical musician, so I knew the hierarchy of such employment. You must look and sound beautiful and tasteful. Preferably you are in a corner, as the guqin player was, your sound is as unobtrusive as possible, and you play repertoire that is familiar. Listening to her so intently, then, was almost a subversive act. I didn’t know the music she was playing. But I recognised its genre, a sweeping folk melody that was both poignant and rousing, a combination at which the Chinese also seemed to excel.

  During her next break I went over and asked her about the music. Like many Chinese she preceded our conversation with an apology for her bad English, but she spoke it well. She introduced herself by her English name, Miriam.

  After a few polite exchanges I asked if she played music full time.

  No, she told me, I am actually a doctor.

  Of music?

  She shook her head. Of traditional Chinese medicine.

  TCM, I echoed her reply as its acronym. Ever since I’d arrived in China I’d been trying to find a good TCM doctor. Most Chinese I’d asked, though, didn’t know of any. They all went to western doctors. It had become a kind of running joke, made more ironic when I divulged that back home I usually only saw a Chinese doctor, and that for most common health problems I took herbs or had acupuncture.

  You’re studying? I asked. She looked so young.

  No, I am a fully qualified doctor, she smiled sweetly. But many people ask me that. It is the reason why I can’t practise medicine.

  What do you mean?

  I had a job in two hospitals and in each place the patient would ask for another doctor – an older doctor, a man doctor. They didn’t think someone who looked like me could practise medicine.

  I wanted to ask her more about this. But I noticed the maître d’hôtel hovering and didn’t want to pry further.

  I changed the subject back to music. I told her about my journey around the world singing and researching love songs. She told me the next piece she was going to play was based on a famous story about two star-crossed lovers from warring families who die tragically and turn into butterflies. Many traditional Chinese folk songs were about love: lost, unrequited, tragic, haunting, eternal love.

  The two lovers are like the Chinese version of Juliet and Romeo, she explained. They both die and become butterflies and fly away and live together for a long time.

  She sighed.

  But I don’t really know if such a love exists, she continued, surprisingly philosophical. Though I keep looking.

  I thought I saw or heard her tear up. But she bowed her head, so I couldn’t tell if she really was crying. Or if she just had a voice or face that easily carried a tremor. I wondered if she’d had a recent break-up. I gently asked if I could make a recording of the piece on the Zoom recorder that I carried around with me most days. If she allowed me to record the music, I promised to make her a copy. She agreed.

  As I expected, the song was sweet, sad and soulful, with plucked tremolo, tragic motifs and cascades of sound that washed through the hotel.

  After she finished ‘The Butterfly Lovers’, she segued into another piece, and I noticed Sue and Gerard getting up to leave. I nodded goodbye to Miriam – whose fingers, I noticed, moved like butterflies across the strings – and indicated I would see her again soon. She smiled serenely as I turned back to my friends and walked out with them.

  We were all talking about how much we loved Shanghai when, around the corner from the lobby, I noticed some stairs leading upwards. On the wall at the foot of the stairs there was a sign that read Peace Hotel Gallery … Hours Available.

  It was nearly closing time. But I was so intrigued by the prospect of a Peace Gallery that I excused myself and walked up the stairs to find out what such a place would reveal about the hotel’s history.

  The gallery was a small room lined with neatly framed photos above a series of glass display cabinets. As I began walking across the room, a jovial-looking man wearing a uniform introduced himself as the director of the gallery. His name was Mr Martin Ma, and he had worked at the hotel for nearly fifty years. When I asked if I could record our conversation about the hotel’s history, he was initially suspicious of me – as many Chinese officials usually are of a westerner holding a recording device. But after reassuring him I was a writer, not a journalist, a difference that he interpreted as significant, he relaxed.

  For the next half-hour I learned about the hotel, which had been built by Victor Sassoon, a rich Jewish businessman. When it first opened in 1929, it was called the Cathay Hotel, and it became an important part of the ‘gateway to China’ role that Shanghai played for over a century.

  During his commentary Martin referred convivially to many famous names as if he personally knew them. Charlie Chaplin came with his Great Dictator co-star Paulette Goddard, when they couldn’t stay at other hotels – they weren’t married at the time. Noël Coward wrote his gloriously plaintive song ‘Someday I’ll Find You’ during one of his stays and, according to folklore, wrote his play Private Lives in four days during another visit when he was confined to his bed with the flu. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were also visitors – in the fading days of their superstardom – as was George Bernard Shaw. Steven Spielberg did location shoots at the hotel when he was making Empire of the Sun, adapted from JG Ballard’s book about his experiences in Shanghai during the war.

  The roll call of famous visitors was rich and historically significant, and Martin spoke delightfully – and delightedly – about the foreign dignitaries, prime ministers, presidents and leaders who had visited the Pea
ce Hotel: Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, to name but a few. He became more sombre, but only slightly, when he told of how the Japanese occupied the hotel during the war and set up headquarters in Victor Sassoon’s private suite, causing the magnate to flee. He brightened, though, when he divulged that, despite a bomb exploding on the street right outside, the hotel itself remained unscathed during the war.

  The Communist Revolution in 1949 was bad for business at the hotel, as many wealthy Chinese exiled themselves to Hong Kong, Europe, America and Australia. As foreign investment in China dried up, the hotel had to be closed in 1952, before re-opening four years later as the Peace Hotel, named after an international peace conference in Beijing. Hotel guests steadily returned as overseas visitors came back to Shanghai, but they fled again during the Cultural Revolution, as foreigners were regarded as the imperialist dogs of Mao’s propaganda apparatus.

  After falling into disrepair during the last part of the twentieth century, the hotel was painstakingly renovated by the Fairmont hotel consortium for three years, and it re-opened to great fanfare in 2010. According to Martin, these days were the very best days the hotel – and Shanghai itself – had ever seen. I was pleased to hear this after all the turmoil the hotel had been through; pleased for Martin, whose loyalty to his place of employment was charming and touching.

  The consortium had pledged to restore the Peace Hotel – now the Fairmont Peace Hotel – to its former glory. It was certainly a fantastic place to stay, in the heart of Shanghai’s famous Bund area, which overlooked the newly constructed district of Pudong. Pudong, which had been hardly more than a fishermen’s swamp ten years before, now resembled a sparkling alien world, with buildings created by some of the world’s top architects who had vied for the challenge of designing a high-tech, feng shui–inspired business district. This was modern Shanghai, the place whose development made the Chinese proud but commentators all over the world anxious. In newspapers and blogs, they would tut-tut that every expansion heralded an eventual contraction, that every rapid rise preluded a meteoric collapse.