by Linda Neil
As Martin guided me back to the stairs, I held out my hand to say goodbye. He grasped it warmly, and pointed to some photos on the far wall. He then led me across the room to a black-and-white photograph of a band of elderly Chinese jazz players.
Martin asked if I preferred younger music and musicians. I told him I thought older jazz players were better because they had played more, seen more, heard more.
There was a topic that had haunted me since I’d arrived in China, one that few Chinese people would discuss with me. I heard that in Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution, I began mischievously, you could still hear jazz in some small bars hidden away in the back streets of the city.
Shanghai had always considered itself different, more cosmopolitan than the rest of China – the Shanghainese I knew prided themselves on it. They were the New Yorkers of China, living on an island of sophistication in a country of proletariat and peasants. So that story hadn’t surprised me.
Martin responded emphatically. No, he said. That is not possible. There was no jazz. No European music or American music at that time. In the revolution they stopped the western music. We only had the Chinese music. Like White-Haired Girl, a very famous ballet. It tells a story about a girl who loved a boy. But a rich landlord asked her to marry him. The girl loved her boy, though, so she went into the mountains rather than marry. After many years her black hair turned to white because she was away so long waiting for her lover to find her. When the village was liberated by the communists her boyfriend met her in the mountains and took her back to the village.
I wondered aloud if love had turned her white hair back to its original colour.
Martin laughed. Of course her hair didn’t change back. But thanks to the Communist Revolution the story had a happy ending, I think. White-Haired Girl is what we call a typical drama. We had eight typical dramas in the Cultural Revolution. Do you know about them?
I told him that I knew very little about the Cultural Revolution, although I imagined people from the west would discuss it more often than those in China. During my first week in the country, though, I had sat next to a professor from Fudan University – Shanghai’s premier university – and he told me he had been reassigned to manual labour during the Cultural Revolution because all the universities and schools had been shut down. If he had ever been outraged by his fate, he seemed sanguine about it now. What’s done is done. The past is gone, he mused over dinner.
It had been a bad time for intellectuals, academics and artists. There’d been violence, suicide, horrible torture and savage humiliations. Old China against New China – that was the official line. In truth, the Red Guards, mostly young hotheads, were let loose in a brutal suppressive rampage across the country, and Mao apparently had done nothing to stop them. The old professors, young poets and budding intellectuals didn’t stand a chance in this cultural onslaught on China’s most revered traditions. Confucianism was derided, the old Buddhist philosophies were discredited, and so was the old literature. Western influences were abhorred as decadent. The country still couldn’t officially discuss it. Like much of its recent history, the Cultural Revolution felt like a deep psychic wound that the authorities seemed fearful to acknowledge.
I guessed that Martin would have been just a boy during that time. And that, as a humble worker at the Peace Hotel, he’d have been spared the brutality of the revolution. It seemed that way as he continued his story.
They closed the universities because no one wanted to learn English – they were too busy doing revolution. So there were no more lessons.
He was matter-of-fact, giving no indication that his dialogue was about to veer off the official line towards something more personal to him.
At the time an American who taught at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute came here. During the revolution it wasn’t safe for her there. So the institute brought her here and she stayed in the hotel. She was an African-American.
He spoke with a kind of triumphant pride. I didn’t know if his pride was connected to the colour of the American professor’s skin or to the unfolding context of the story.
How long did she stay at the hotel? I asked.
She came here in 1967 and she stayed for over a year. She found the room service waiters couldn’t speak good English and volunteered to teach them. She taught two classes, a beginners’ class and a medium class. I was an interpreter for beginners and a student in the medium class. I learned my English from her. I am speaking to you today, I have this job, because of her.
He beamed fondly at the memory of his former teacher. You want to know her name?
I did, although I didn’t expect to recognise it.
Her name was Garvin, Vicki. Vicki Garvin. Do you know her?
I shook my head.
I have had no contact with her since she left in 1968. I hope she is okay and her health is in very good condition. I think she’d be more than eighty years old now. It’s a long time ago.
He seemed so eager to find out about Vicki Garvin that I offered to Google her name and see what that turned up.
My offer excited him. I have waited a long time to know what happened to her. But maybe today everything changes. Maybe you will help me get some information.
He continued reminiscing. You know she wrote the texts herself. She used simple things we could understand, like the descriptions of the rooms here at the Peace Hotel, to teach us. Also the quotations of Chairman Mao. You want to know one I especially remember? He giggled. What is work? Work is struggle.
Oh yes, he concluded. Life is very interesting. Isn’t it? I still have the book that she typed. I typed it out for everybody.
He laughed and laughed, spluttering as he did, as if his body couldn’t contain the memories of forty-seven years of work at the Peace Hotel, and all the violence and joy and extraordinary encounters which that history had contained.
We said goodbye warmly at the top of the stairs. I promised again to do what I could to find information about Vicki. I also promised to come back the following week with a CD copy of the recording I had taken of his tour.
I left the Peace Hotel as if in a dream. As if I had been touched by history in a way I couldn’t yet understand. The gift of stories, of listening to and receiving them, of being at the right place at the right time – all the magic of travel – warmed me down to my toes.
The walk back from the Bund to the subway station was the usual cacophony of tourists, hawkers, cars and motorcycles. But I felt like dancing down the Corso, humming Noël Coward’s ‘Someday I’ll Find You’ – a song my mother used to sing in our lounge room in Brisbane – as if I finally had found that elusive you. In this case, the you was not a lover, but a connection as warm and true as love, from a seemingly random encounter.
The neon seemed especially spectacular that evening. The deeply crimson reds, the iridescent blues, the glorious greens sparkled like they’d been conjured up in a CGI lab. The recent rain gave everything a kind of liquid haze. People might lament the modernisation of Shanghai – the loss of its heritage, the encroachment of business and western decadence. But to me the neon was magic. Like a fairyland. I was falling in love with this city more every day. I loved China too. I wanted it to do well, to thrive: this great, baffling, over-populated country with its collective sense of existence and its impersonal view of things. The vastness of its history made the serenity I’d found at the Peace Hotel that afternoon even more extraordinary.
I was determined to keep my promise to Martin, to repay him for his time that afternoon, and find out what I could about Vicki. I imagined I wouldn’t find out much. She had probably gone back to the States and disappeared into teaching life. The idealism that might have brought her to China in the ’60s probably dissipated with the revelations of Mao’s excesses. With any luck, though, she’d obtained a good tenured job that might show up on a quick Google search. A few lines from a university webs
ite might satisfy Martin, who probably only wanted to know if Vicki Garvin was still alive and if she had an email address where, after all these decades, he could contact her.
On my way back to my hotel, I stopped at Starbucks to order a takeaway latte. While I waited for my order, I chatted to Heidi, a tall, beautiful Chinese girl with a serious face, sad eyes and an occasional dazzling smile, who worked there most days and evenings. Like many of the Chinese I’d met, she worked long hours for little money. She was saving up to move out of her parents’ home, a brave move for a single Shanghai girl. Heidi’s name wasn’t really Heidi. All the workers at Starbucks had chosen Anglicised names and all spoke a little English, to make the café more ‘international’. She had named herself after Heidi Klum, the German supermodel, who, according to Chinese Heidi, was the epitome of grace and beauty: tall, blond, skinny, white.
I told her often she was ten times more beautiful than Heidi Klum or any of the supermodels she was obsessed with. But she said she didn’t see how her yellow skin, boring straight black hair and small eyes could possibly be seen as beautiful.
As I waited for my takeaway, we talked about how she dreamed of going to Paris one day, and Berlin, and New York. But most of all the coast of gold in Australia. I told her I used to take Christmas holidays on the Gold Coast, that my family had a house there. She asked me to tell her about the place and whether the coast really was gold.
The sand was sometimes golden, I reminisced. And sometimes the sun and the sky in the afternoon. There are beaches for miles all up and down the coast.
She gasped with pleasure. Of course, she lamented, it is almost impossible to afford to travel on my wages from Starbucks. And even if I had the money it’s not so easy for us to travel out of China.
I sympathised. It was a difficult time for Shanghainese like Heidi. Advertising and the curious financial system that the Chinese had branded ‘communist capitalism’ had brought western-type dreams. Yet visa and passport restrictions still made travelling difficult.
As she delivered my takeaway to me, I promised her I saw good luck in her future.
I was still sipping from the supposedly recycled container from Starbucks when I got back to my hotel room, opened my computer and Googled the name Vicki Garvin. I realised how difficult it must have been for Martin to find out any information about his former teacher. Most sites about her were blocked, but a few lines in one of the search results described her thus:
Victoria Garvin, African-American liberation
activist and dedicated internationalist, died on
June 11, 2007, after a long illness, at the age of 91.
I emailed the blocked links back to friends in Australia and asked if they could paste the information from those sites into their replies.
A day or so later I received two emails back. Each contained similar information about a black American activist who went by the name Vicki Ama Garvin. She had become a Maoist sympathiser because of his avowed support of racial equality at a time when African-Americans were still being lynched in the South. Most interesting was this information, originally from a Pan-African newsletter but now found on an anti-imperialist news site – which, ironically enough, could not be accessed by the anti-imperialist Chinese:
In 1964 Vicki was invited to China by the Chinese ambassador. Both Malcolm X and Dr DuBois encouraged her to go. She taught English for six years in Shanghai to students and hotel workers. She became close friends with many of her young students and kept in touch with them over the years. In China, she also became close to then political exiles Robert F Williams and Mabel Williams. When Mao Tse-Tung issued his proclamation in support of the Afro-American movement in 1968, Vicki made a speech about the statement to a rally of millions. Also in China she met and married Leibel Bergman in a Red Guard ceremony during the early days of the Cultural Revolution, and became a loving stepmother to his daughter and two sons.
Along with this text, there were two photographs of Vicki that had been used at her memorial in 2007. She was a striking woman: I was instantly drawn to her. The earlier photograph, in black and white, showed a slim, well-dressed woman with a regal posture and the natural beauty of a model. In the aura she exuded, she looked, as Barack Obama would many decades later, like someone who would make a difference. It was as if she had decided on work, engagement and action as the course of her life – as if she had been born knowing what needed to be done, and would always act and work for her people.
That knowledge came through in how she presented herself. In this photograph she was wearing a stylish white coat as she stood at an old-fashioned radio microphone, holding papers in her hand. Written on a banner draped across the platform was the partially hidden word McCarthy. Presumably this referred to the notorious anti-communist senator who instigated the witch hunts that led to the ‘reds under the bed’ hysteria in the US in the early ’50s. Perhaps she was delivering a speech to rally African-American workers to fight for their civil rights – a cause she was dedicated to, as the accompanying text mentioned several times. I imagined that it must have been difficult to be Vicki Garvin in the Cold War years, and marvelled at her poise amid what must have been daily surveillance from the FBI and the CIA.
The second photograph was in colour and showed Vicki later in life as a warm, relaxed, almost jovial woman; her smile was bright, un-ironic; her eyes keenly intelligent. She was still stylish, wearing a silken green dress patterned with blue and crimson flowers; her short white hair was brushed back in a soft halo. She reminded me of my grandmother, who also had that bearing of someone who had agency – even though my grandmother had been terrified of communists, as many people were in Australia after the Second World War, and suspicious, in her Irish Catholic way, of people who held different political views.
I felt relieved looking at the older Vicki. For someone who had had to overcome many battles, with so much violence accompanying the revolutions that embodied her political ideals, she appeared to have her sense of peace and humour intact. Her clear, virtually unlined face had become even more dignified and beautiful – serene, friendly and without obvious bitterness.
Martin would be excited to learn all this: I immediately pasted this information into an email to him.
She was recognized by many organizations as an ‘honored elder’ for her contributions to the freedom struggle of her people and the world’s peoples. In speeches made just before her serious health decline, Vicki urged the younger generations forward. She wrote: ‘Of course there will be twists and turns, but victory in the race belongs to the long-distance runners, not sprinters. Everywhere the just slogan is reverberating – no justice, no peace!’
It seemed incredible that my seemingly random conversation with Martin had unlocked this information for him. I thought again of China and its collective sense of history, of the impression it worked so hard to give of order and harmony. What was going on underneath this populous country, I wondered, where folk songs about impossible love seemed embedded in the psyche? What about Martin’s life had led him, with his memories and private wonderings, to ask a stranger about someone he once knew? Did he ask everyone who came into the gallery, or only those curious enough to take it further? And what about my life, lived out in the relative security of Australia, where the chances of encountering Vicki Garvin and her story were virtually nil, had led me to him?
Two days later I received an email back.
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011
Subject: RE: Vicki Garvin
Dear Linda,
You are so kind sending this text of Vicki Garvin to me. I will read it carefully and throughly. This is what I am looking for many many years. How it would be much better if I can find it earlier. But I am still so appreciated.
Martin Ma
Director of Peace Gallery
I replied at once and asked if he could provide some details about his own life, hoping to have a clea
rer picture about how it fitted into the tapestry of China’s history.
I spent the next few days preparing the CDs to take back to the Peace Hotel. First, I made a clean recording of my interview with Martin. He had never heard himself speak and I imagined he might be taken aback. I spent a lot of time smoothing out his stumbles and hesitations, and editing out the bangs and clashes from in and around the Peace Gallery, so that his English sounded as clear and fluid as possible. His personality, so amiable in person, expressed itself even more impressively – and subtly – the more I listened.
I also spent some time on the recording I had made of ‘The Butterfly Lovers’. The acoustics were already good and the playing was flawless, so all I did was add a little reverb to make the CD sound almost professional. An inquiry back to another friend in Australia had brought me this information:
The eight typical revolutionary operas were engineered by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and were the only forms of artistic expression allowed in China during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike the European western model, where opera was a form of bourgeois entertainment for the cultured and wealthy, the operas were made in accordance with Mao’s provision that ‘art must serve the interests of the workers, peasants, and soldiers and must conform to proletarian ideology’.
My last two weeks in Shanghai passed by quickly. So it was not until two days before I was about to leave the city that I returned to the Peace Hotel. In my bag I carried the two CDs I had promised my new friends: a recording of my conversation with Martin and a recording of ‘The Butterfly Lovers’ for Miriam. Martin was having one of his rare days off: I left the CD with his colleague who was that day in charge of the Peace Gallery. Miriam was in the middle of her recital when I arrived downstairs, so I had a chance once again to listen to the echo of the guqin as it reverberated through the lobby. Afterwards we sat together and, when I had given her the CD, she told me she had decided to go to New York to be with her American boyfriend. I wondered aloud whether it would be difficult for her to get a passport and visa to travel to the States. But she told me that in the new China, things like going and returning were not as difficult as they had once been. For her, America was not the land of plenty or the land of her dreams. It was a place like many other places, to visit and explore. She thanked me for the CD as we stood outside the Peace Hotel, about to head in opposite directions. She was going left up the Bund and I was headed right towards the train station where I would take the metro back to Zhongshan Park. The atmosphere was misty, and as I walked I noticed my eyes were too. I was glad I had left a memento of my visit with Martin and Miriam because I did not know if I would have the chance to return to Shanghai.