All Is Given
Page 10
On the way back from the train station in Zhongshan Park to my hotel, I stopped in at Starbucks to say goodbye to my friends there. Heidi surprised me by gathering the staff around her and presenting me with a gift: a Starbucks mug with Shanghai emblazoned on the front. I hugged each of them; when I embraced Heidi, I promised to send her a similar mug back from the Gold Coast. Ahh, she sighed, the coast of gold. I’ll meet you there soon.
*
Two days after Christmas, which I spent with my family at Brighton, a seaside suburb north of Brisbane, I received an email from Martin:
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011
Subject: thank you
Dear Linda,
I am really appreciated receiving your email in such a quickplay.
Now I answer your questions.
I was born in Shanghai at Hwang Pu District, a lane very closed the Jing An District and also near the Soochow Creek. There was a small temple near by, named Da Wang Miao (Temple of King). I can show you the place if you were interested at your next coming.
I got my first job of working in Peace Hotel, it wasn’t found by myself, but assigned by the Lane Business Association after I graduate junior middle school at 18. Without interview, but health check-up before they accept me to enter.
Same as you miss Shanghai and especially the Peace Hotel, I really miss your return too and talk to you again.
Please feel free asking me if you have any query.
Sincerely Yours,
Martin Ma
Director of Peace Gallery
I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Martin and Vicki. I was eager to keep connecting all the threads of what seemed to be a bigger, more international story. After some ferreting on Google, I had managed to track down one of Vicki’s surviving stepchildren, Lincoln Bergman. His father, Leibel Bergman, a prominent revolutionary and communist in the United States, had married Vicki in that Red Guard ceremony. Lincoln was a broadcaster, teacher, writer and poet, and was also deeply devoted to left-wing causes. His first poem, written when he was eight, was a tribute to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and his website biography gave an extraordinary insight into life as a child of revolutionaries:
I live in Richmond, California, on a hill with a view of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, and the San Francisco skyline when the fog lifts. I write to you from a yurt in our backyard.
I retired from Lawrence Hall of Science, a science and curriculum development center at UC Berkeley, in mid-2010, but still do some editorial work there … I attended Deep Springs Jr. College – a unique liberal arts college and working cattle ranch, in Deep Springs Valley, two valleys up from Death Valley. I went on to junior year at Cornell University, living at Telluride House, in 1964/5.
The next year, thanks to my father’s intense interest in and support of the Chinese revolution, I taught English to college students my age at the Institute for International Relations in the People’s Republic of China (it was forbidden for US citizens to travel there in those years). When I returned I graduated from UC Berkeley, and completed graduate work in Journalism.
I was News Director at KPFA-FM in Berkeley in the late 1960s/early 1970s, where I anchored daily newscasts, did interviews with many activists and authors, and produced documentaries, reporting on and reflecting the militant spirit of the times. Since mid-2010 I’ve been active in the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, an organization begun in San Francisco with chapters in other states and nations.
I had written to Lincoln to let him know of Martin – that, in a small gallery in Shanghai, someone was speaking well of his late stepmother and the work she did decades before. On 27 December, the same day I heard from Martin, I received an email back from Lincoln.
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011
Subject: Vicki
Dear Linda – thanks so much for your emails about Vicki. I did not get the first email or I would have responded right away. In any event, now we are in touch! …
For this email, I just wanted to let you know that I at long last got your email, as Claude Marks at Freedom Archives sent the email to me – I am a co-founder of the group and volunteer there frequently.
Several African-American academics in the US have done work related to Vicki since her death – I will send you that information as well as some other things that will interest you and Martin – she would be so happy to know that he and you have made this connection! I have never returned to China after my year there in 1965-6 tho my father and Vicki went back a number of times. I know it has changed hugely, and that’s an understatement!
So, give me a couple weeks and I promise I’ll get back to you in more detail about Vicki’s life here after China, her memorial that my sister Miranda and I organized in New York, some photographs and related things. I have been meaning to put up a slide show about Vicki on the Freedom Archives website for some time – maybe this will help me move forward on that!
All the best and if you don’t hear from me by mid-January, please don’t hesitate to write again!
Lincoln
January came and went. I was busy preparing to leave for Paris, where I was scheduled to live till September. Preparations for yet another relocation overseas became so intense that I had little time to think about Vicki and Martin and the revolution that had brought them together. Secretly, though, I wished only to return to China, where I felt I had found something precious and rare, but which I also found hard to name.
It wasn’t until more than a year later, in mid-February 2013, after my time in Paris, another city of revolutions, that I emailed Lincoln to remind him of his offer to send me further information about Vicki. I felt bad that I had kept Martin waiting so long. But perhaps after all this time, the decades of turmoil and revolutionary changes, waiting for one more year was a small challenge.
A couple of weeks later, I heard back from Lincoln.
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2013
Subject: RE: Vicki
Hi Linda:
So sorry not to have gotten back in touch sooner, and appreciate the reminder!
If I didn’t last time, I should mention this book, which has a chapter about Vicki by Dayo Gore, a scholar who I think is still working on more about Vicki.
It’s called: Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle.
I recommend it!
Along with his email Lincoln sent a vivid collection of photographs of Vicki, from her teen years to old age. I forwarded it all to Martin, who replied swiftly:
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013
Subject: RE: about Vicki Garvin
Dear Linda,
I was always thinking of you after I received your latest email several month ago. I still remember that you told me you will stay in Paris for 6 months. Just 2-3 days ago, I think it is many months passed. Is it the right time you back to Australia? Thanks to God, your email with the photos of Vicki coming!
As I planned, I will decorate a special showcase in the Peace Gallery for my Teacher Garvin, with the photos you have sent me, with the text papers which I am keeping for 40 years, and other memorabilia. I will send you pictures of the showcase after it done.
Shanghai is in Spring now. The weather is always fine. Come back here if you have a chance. We are waiting for you!
Our correspondence was sporadic over the next few years, but Martin fulfilled his dream of commemorating Vicki at the Peace Hotel. I received his news via delightful emails.
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2013
Subject: RE: about Vicki Garvin
Dear Linda,
Haven’t heard from you for more then one month. May be you haven’t got any information from Lincoln too.
But I have had already showing the memorabilias of Vicki Garvin in the display cabinet of Peace Gallery as I think of her.
I haven’t use the images which you send me but I use one download from
the website myself.
Here I attached the picture of the display cabinet for your information.
Kind Regards!
Martin Ma
Director of Peace Gallery
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2013
Subject: RE: about Vicki Garvin
Dear Linda,
How a nice plan it is!
Everything is ok for me, I am ok with the idea of appearing on the radio documentary, I wouldn’t mind you made it into a story for your next book and use the interview you record with me.
In the picture of the display cabinet of Vicki Garvin which I sent to you last email, the typed page is written on the English lessons of Quotations from Chairman Mao, which was used as the text book.
Here I attached some more of the English lessons text paper and other notes written by Vicki to me about the English classes at the time during the culture revolution.
And some word doc. from website for your reference.
With best wishes!
Martin Ma
Director of Peace Gallery
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013
Subject: RE: about Vicki Garvin
Hi again Linda,
We have published a book named ‘Peace Impression’ last year. And I am the one of the three writers of this book. There is a paragraph of Vicki Garvin. Now I give you the text as below for your information.
Tears of African American Teacher Vicki Garvin
In 1965 an African American woman Vicki Garvin arrived in Shanghai. Her Husband was a leader of the black liberation movement [whose members were] assassinated. And she too became a target. With the help of the friends, she was appointed as an English teacher in Shanghai International Studies College, during the Cultural Revolution, she had to move to Peace Hotel due to the fighting between school students. When she found that hotel staff spoke poor English, She offered to teach them English for free.
Garvin divided the hotel staff into elementary and medium classes. Lacking any textbooks Garvin taught the students using the English version of Quotation from Chairman Mao. Even the material in the hotel rooms were adapted for teaching. Those text books are kept by her students till today.
On April 4, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King shocked the whole world. On April 16, Mao Zedong made a public ‘Declaration of Supporting African Americans’ Resistance’. The fight of African Americans was never supported by their own politicians but supported by the great Chinese leader Chairman Mao, said Garvin when shedding tears.
Martin Ma
Director of Peace Gallery
*
For weeks after I arrived back in Brisbane I couldn’t get the smell of Shanghai out of my things. After washing all my clothes it was still there. Was it in my skin, embedded in my hair, rubbed into my scalp? I washed some more, sprayed perfume, burned incense and fragrant oils.
After another week of sniffing, I realised the smell was coming from my laptop. But although I scrubbed and polished my computer till it sparkled, it still retained the distinctive smell of the city. I imagined that it had been created by pollution, multi-ethnic cooking, motorbike and car fumes, and the scent of millions of people – their wishes and their dreams, their smiles and their politeness, and their unassailable belief in an economic stability that would magically erase the sufferings of their past. Every time I opened my laptop to write about the city I could smell Shanghai – coming straight from my laptop’s heart, I would joke to myself.
I can still smell it now.
But that wasn’t all Shanghai had left me with. When I got back home, I was depressed for well over a month. I had initially thought it was a particularly awful case of jet lag, but after several more weeks passed I realised it was something deeper. A friend suggested to me that perhaps I was mourning.
Mourning for what? I asked.
I don’t know, she replied. Did you fall in love over there?
Not with anyone in particular. Kind of with everybody I met though, I suppose.
Then you’re in mourning for Shanghai. You miss it and your heart is a little broken.
I knew she was right. I had fallen in love with the city just as you would a person.
Maybe it’s just the stimulation I miss, I suggested. The excitement of feeling that you’re at the new centre of the world. That feeling of foreignness that makes everything so … new … and fresh.
That’s what you live for, isn’t it? she asked. That foreignness. Some people dread it. But you love it.
She knew me well. I loved every place I visited. But some perhaps more than others.
*
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015
Subject: A presentation of Vicki
Hi Linda,
I asked the Director of the Peace Museum, is the presentation of Vicki still exist in the Museum? She checked and sent me the photos by iPhone. I am trying to send it to you now.
Martin
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015
Subject: RE: A presentation of Vicki
thankyou so much for arranging to send these Martin
I am wondering how your life is? are you still working at the hotel?
How is Shanghai? I miss the city so much. I am still writing the story about Vicki!
warm regards
linda
Date: Sat, 9 May 2015
Subject: RE: A presentation of Vicki
Sorry for my late reply.
After three years worked as the Director of Peace Gallery, I had finally finished my work of 49 years and 10 months in the Peace Hotel in July, 2013. Now I am quite enjoying my retired life. For my son’s family is staying with us, so I have to look after my grand-daughter, a 14 months baby girl after her parents going to work. I am quite busy helping my wife with her housework.
The elder school in my district ask me to teach Oral English from ABC for 30 old man students once a week. So I am a little busier.
Shanghai is not change too much recently, I think. Come again if you miss the city so much.
I am so interested you are still writing the story about Vicki. I would like tell you one more thing. There was a young lady who worked with Vicki in 1968 in Shanghai. She is an English woman about 30 years at the time. Her name is Knight. Once she asked me, what’s your name? After I told her my name is Ma. She laughed and said, your name means a horse in Chinese. My name is knight, means a man ride on the horse. It’s so funny, that’s why I still remember her name so clear up to now.
Warm regards!
Martin
*
Recently, I dreamed I was in Shanghai again. That I walked into the lobby of the Peace Hotel, through which the sound of the guqin cascaded like a waterfall, and climbed the steps to the gallery, where Martin, with his dazzling smile, was waiting for me – not for me to return after my visit to Shanghai, but for me to arrive, decades after his country’s last official revolution had ended.
The dream prompted me to go through the audio files I had stored on my laptop. After a couple of dead-end searches I came across a folder called ‘Shanghai Sounds’. I opened it and spent a few hours listening to the recordings I had carried home with me as a memento of my visit.
I heard again the traffic zipping down Huichuan Road through Zhongshan Park; the Afghani music I would surreptitiously sway my hips to at the Uyghur Restaurant; the hair-raising taxi ride I took once through peak hour to get to a book event in the city’s tourist precinct; the gorgeous kids at Starbucks and their nihaos to everyone who walked in through the doors; the flower lady outside the station; the announcements on the subway trains, made in perfect Chinese-accented English; the milling crowds along the Bund and the click and whir of a thousand phone cameras as they recorded this spectacular moment in their city’s history.
The sounds conjured up Shanghai for me on the computer that still carried the fai
nt scent of the city, and made me laugh and cry at the thought of what I had left behind. And, despite my promises to return when I left, I knew I might never see any of it again.
Finally, I came across the recordings I had made at the Peace Hotel. Of Martin and his smiling voice talking about the hotel’s tumultuous history, about Vicki Garvin and the Cultural Revolution. Of Miriam plucking and strumming ‘The Butterfly Lovers’ at high tea and her description of how the lovers turned into butterflies so that they would never be apart. And I thought of how stories can be like butterflies too: transformed by longing into something delicate, beautiful and difficult to pin down.
Wild Strawberries in Mongolia
My sister packed tubs of fresh strawberries in our suitcases the morning we left for Ulaanbaatar. Cathie had heard there were shortages of many things in Mongolia’s capital, and strawberries in particular were nearly impossible to get hold of. She was used to the variety of travel but these days she liked to know at least what she was having for breakfast. Hence, she had packed the strawberries, along with a carton of So Good soy milk and some Weet-Bix covered in Glad Wrap.
We were departing from Hong Kong, where Cathie was head of music at the Chinese International School. Unlike many of the expats she worked with, who lived on the main island of Hong Kong, she lived in Kowloon, where she bought Weet-Bix, So Good and most of her preferred Australian brands at the local supermarket. Things like her favourite bread mix were harder to find, but Cathie managed to get a steady supply from friends who’d visited her regularly since she’d relocated to Hong Kong.