Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Mr Shi raised no objection to this plan. In fact, he suggested I take the car to Ah Po’s. He would come too.

  Next morning we drove towards the sea through the industrial straggle of chimneys, power stations and silos that lines the north bank of the Huangpu. The road was bumpy with railway tracks running from dockside complexes to other parts of the city. In the end we reached a gate with a guard on it, who recognized Mr Shi’s pass, and we drove into a deep, wide compound with trees and flowerbeds, and numerous three-storey houses of red brick grouped round an ugly red-brick church. There had been an American mission school here, Ah Po explained to Shi; now it was an engineering college. The mission’s church was a store. Ah Po’s wife, Ching Man, lived in a third-floor flat with her mother and father, both recently retired teachers, her sister and a brother. Ching Man was a tall girl, pretty and shy; she spoke very little Cantonese, and no English at all. This increased her shyness, and her shyness seemed to make her stooped. Her unmarried sister, even prettier, had the almost unnaturally healthy looks of girls on Chinese Government posters. She wanted nothing more, she said in weak English, than to go to Hong Kong. Mr Shi’s expression remained one of cool benevolence.

  The flat, not large, was bright – three rooms, I think, two or three people to each. The living room was stacked with Ah Po’s New Year presents: hi-fi equipment, a television set, an electric mixing machine and a jumbo-sized thermos. I wished he had bought an electric heater.

  His mother-in-law gave us all plates of sweet dumplings and cups of tea – and Ah Po’s good news was revealed. Ching Man had been granted permission to leave Shanghai: she would join him in Hong Kong. The whole family was celebrating her good fortune. Even Mr Shi, eating his dumplings, looked as pleased as anyone else.

  The hows and whys of permits to leave China are not easy to understand because they change so often. Ah Po’s family, in China as fugitives from anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia, had been able to leave again as original expatriates.

  Ah Po’s mother-in-law said, ‘Ah Po’s family passed through Shanghai from Nanking to go to Hong Kong. So we arranged that Ah Po should come back, marry our daughter and take her to Hong Kong, too.’

  I said, ‘Ah Po, how good you are! You were doing a most charitable thing.’

  Everyone laughed, and Ah Po patted his wife and giggled, ‘I love, I love.’

  *

  In the afternoon, with Mr Shi and Thomas Dor, I crossed the Soochow Creek at the northern end of the Bund over a bridge near gardens where elderly men were concentrating on the slow-motion martial exercises I had seen the two crewmen practising on the stern of the S S Shanghai. The park had been exclusively European in the old days. The Soochow Creek had reeked of the hovels that lined it. We made our way towards the railway station at Chapei and, I forget why, to an austere building with tall windows looking down on a schoolyard. I think perhaps the building must have been a museum. What I know is that the schoolyard that Mr Shi pointed out had been the ante-chamber to a human abattoir. Here, the prototype of Malraux’s revolutionary, Kyo, and the Russian agent, Katow – together with hundreds of other Communist prisoners – had had to wait in turn for their deaths in the Chapei goods yard nearby, to be thrown alive by Chiang’s soldiers into the furnaces of the locomotives. Imagine lying prone on the floor of a schoolyard, and listening for the twin signals of the agonizing deaths of each of your comrades: the crack of his exploding skull, a single shriek of the locomotive’s whistle. And then the bark: ‘Next one – you!’ I had read somewhere that human heads explode just like roasted chestnuts. Is there a worse death? The young prisoner next to Katow was sobbing, ‘To be burnt alive! … Even one’s eyes…. Every finger and then one’s stomach….’ How could anyone’s dignity as a human being survive a minute of such a situation? Mine might survive a second or two; no more.

  Human dignity. Malraux’s Kyo used the words to explain his presence in the ranks of the revolutionaries. Malraux’s König, Chiang Kai-shek’s police chief, bursts out:

  ‘Dignity! In Siberia, I was taken by the Reds…. I had a lieutenant’s star on each epaulette…. They drove a nail into each of my shoulders, through those stars. A nail as long as your finger…. I squealed like a woman, blubbered like a baby…. My friend, you would be well advised not to say too much about dignity. My own dignity consists of killing them off….’

  When I told Mr Shi about the Chapei executions, the locomotive’s whistle and what it had meant, he shook his head and said nothing for a time. Then he said, ‘I suffered in the Cultural Revolution, too.’

  ‘At least they didn’t throw you into the fire.’

  ‘Ha-ha! No, not that!’

  We passed down a street I had wanted to see, remembering it from an old photograph of the early 1900s. In the picture banners hanging across the street had said ‘Strike for a 12-hour day!’ and ‘No More Work for Children under Eight!’ When I mentioned this, Thomas Dor said, ‘Work! I tell people in Hong Kong, “Ease up. You work too hard. You’ll die young.” In Shanghai now, people live to seventy or eighty years old; they don’t work so hard. No incentive.’ Does that mean that dignity, so often said to reside in labour, can now coexist with taking it easy? An odd thing, dignity. In affluent Europe, among the industrial conflicts, the soccer hooligans and the ‘Good Living’ pages in glossy magazines, dignity is undoubtedly elusive. In less fortunate regions idealists can, in the name of dignity, liquidate one in furnaces or hammer three-inch nails into one’s shoulders. Small, unassuming people like Wei Kuen wear dignity as easily as they wear the scarves their wives have knitted for them.

  *

  In appearance, Wei Kuen was commonplace; that is to say, his face was friendly, ruddy and wide-awake, but he had none of Ah Po’s exuberant good looks. He was short and almost plump; he would grow into a roly-poly middle age. Despite his alert, blackcurrant eyes he conveyed an element of reserve and introspection that Ah Po lacked. He was thoughtful and observant. He was modest, too; his clothes were not shabby, but they were ‘sensible’ – sober in colour and hard-wearing – while Ah Po, in his fluffy white sweater and pale blue jeans, was something of a dandy.

  Wei Kuen and his wife, Shun Ling, called to take me to their room on a terribly cold afternoon. A dark grey sky settled down over the frozen city as if intent on crushing it. The wind from the river slashed through my anorak and my scarf, and reached my bones. I had tried, with Shi’s help, to buy a Chinese padded coat, but the shops didn’t stock my size, or maybe the ‘Outsize Foreign Visitor’ range had sold out.

  Mr Shi politely declined to come with me to Wei Kuen’s. He said he had important things to do at home – and if I didn’t mind…. I didn’t mind at all. ‘But take the car,’ he said unexpectedly. So Jade Dragon drove us to Wei Kuen’s.

  The house was a long way away, tucked into a row of old, three-storeyed houses buried in the decrepit heart of the old city. Here Jade Dragon dropped us and drove away. We stumbled into a small doorway, then up an unlit wooden staircase. It was very narrow, ill-lit by a single bulb overhead, with a peeling wall on either side and jagged holes in the skirting. On the first floor, a wizened face peered out as our clumping footsteps approached, its wrinkles registering shock to see – what was this? – a tall European groping his way through the half-light,shoulders bent under the dilapidated ceiling. Other doorways revealed small, palsied rooms, lit with a single strip of neon. Wei Kuen and his wife had two small neon strips in their room. My anorak felt about as warm as a pair of silk pyjamas. I trembled from head to foot. It was below freezing by the feel of it, but, as at Ah Po’s, I saw no heating of any kind. Perhaps body heat was enough, if you were used to nothing else.

  Wei Kuen said his father-in-law and two brothers-in-law lived downstairs. His mother-in-law slept under a quilt behind a screen at the far end of the room. Clothes and blankets were scattered over the backs of the few chairs. Stacks of cheap suitcases filled much of the little room; the only luxury I recall was a Hitachi TV set under a yellow cloth. Whe
n I moved, the wooden floor snapped and creaked. Mildew spread greenish maps down the whitewashed walls.

  ‘Sorry, so cold,’ said Wei Kuen cheerfully, wrapping a blanket round my shoulders. I was annoyed with myself. Why hadn’t I heeded Angel Yip’s advice to bring warm ‘dresses’? It was a great relief when Shun Ling began to make tea, warm in her blue padded smock as he was in his brown leather jacket and high-necked sweater. Shun Ling is pleasant-looking but not pretty. She has a goldfish look, the little pursed goldfish mouth of so many Chinese girls who wear large, round glasses – the glasses emphasize the mouth in that fishy way, or perhaps it’s that the big, round lenses resemble goldfish bowls. More important, she is humorous and good natured. She talks in the same swift and decisive way as Wei Kuen, and together they present a four-square, quizzical, undaunted face to the guileful world.

  But there were things I wanted to know. How had they met? After all, Wei Kuen is a Cantonese, born in Hong Kong, while Shun Ling is from Shanghai.

  ‘My wife’s brother was a seaman like me,’ he said. ‘We made friends when he and I were in Hong Kong with Blue Funnel Line.’ So he had suggested that Wei Kuen might marry his sister….

  ‘Arranging’ marriages like this helped girls to leave China – but did it mean a happy marriage? ‘We’re lucky,’ Shun Ling said (Wei Kuen translating). ‘Girls who arrange to marry boys they’ve never met are marrying passports. Often very disastrous. Husbands sometimes cruel. Sometimes girls don’t like Hong Kong. I’d advise girls not to do it – this arranging. Unless they love.’

  All this trouble and doubt – about emigrating to Hong Kong. Was it worth it? Wasn’t Hong Kong’s special appeal strictly limited in time to its predetermined end in 1997? In a sense, yes, Thomas Dor had explained; but vulnerable people like Wei Kuen and Ah Po and their young wives must always live with hope. In any case, he said, Wei Kuen and Ah Po already lived in Hong Kong; naturally they wanted their wives with them. Apart from that, there was always the expectation of several years of the present opportunity to work overtime, to earn more money, to spend that extra money on better clothes, a better school, the cinema, and to be able – God willing – to save for their children’s future. There might even be a chance to travel – some time. Who knew? And who knew, either, what really would happen in 1997? Maybe simply a change of ruler. Perhaps life in Hong Kong would go on as before. I could not argue with that.

  The door opened and a man of about Wei Kuen’s age came in and looked at me, taken aback. Shyly, he shook my hand. This was one of Wei Kuen’s brothers-in-law from the room below, home from his shift in the Huangpu dockyard. He had brought a bunch of plastic flowers and put them into the plastic vase on the only table. Then he sat and watched us.

  ‘You’ll be glad to leave one day for Hong Kong?’ I asked Shun Ling.

  ‘Oh, yes … I think … but I’m not sure,’ she said with a little smile. ‘All those Cantonese people….’

  When it was time to go, Wei Kuen and Shun Ling wrapped scarves round their necks in the doorway.

  We groped our way down the ramshackle stairs into the blackness of the street, and it was like lowering ourselves into an icy flood. Shanghai was blacked out like wartime London and it was rush hour. A solid, pushing, human mass filled the pavements; people in dark blue tunics barely seen, identical shapes advancing silently, dark against the darkness.

  I was suddenly frightened that I might get separated from Wei Kuen. He could be swept away from me very easily – and what then? I was utterly incapable of telling any of these blue-uniformed shapes where I wanted to go to. Claustrophobia! Alone in China’s largest city, a freezing night coming on, inadequately clothed, deprived of speech…. For once I was grateful that I towered above the Chinese. Thanks to that I managed, with difficulty, to keep Wei Kuen in sight or in touch; time and again my desperate handholds on his arm were torn away by the press. I could see his face, a pale buoy bobbing in and out of an ocean of inky waves, straining to keep me in sight. I saw reflected in it my own anxiety.

  In the main thoroughfare the crowds surged round a bus stop like breakers round a rock. Buses came and went, but again and again the human turbulence swept me away from their doors. At last a likely one wallowed up – but stopped a hundred yards down the road. We fought our way towards it. ‘Ha!’ – Wei Kuen reached the door as it closed, banged on it with his fists and pointed to me. The door opened and I leaped in. ‘Tell him where I go,’ I yelled to Wei Kuen, but the door snapped shut sharply, blotting him out. Would I ever see him again? The bus moved jerkily away. My arms were pinned by mufflered strangers, and to avoid my head banging the low roof I was obliged to stand stooped like an old heron. I could imagine what a ludicrous sight I was, and suddenly I wanted to giggle. ‘Mysterious disappearance of…. Last seen running for a bus in Shanghai.’ I could see the headline now.

  Someone tugged at my anorak. A woman had moved aside on her bench, pressing against her neighbour to make a tiny space for me. I squeezed in between her and a dark-skinned soldier with the narrowest slit eyes I’ve ever seen. His gaze for the next twenty minutes never left my face. It was as if he had dislocated his neck into a permanent eyes-right.

  Much later the bus pulled up on the Bund, and of course now my semi-panic shamed me. The conductor patted my arm, and in a moment the warmth and light of the Peace Hotel washed over me.

  I went to the bar and asked the barman for a Panda Cocktail.

  ‘Panda, good,’ he said, smiling encouragingly as I drank.

  ‘Same again,’ I said.

  Whenever I heard the ‘Chinese masses’ mentioned in future, I would remember this hectic evening in the Shanghai blackout.

  *

  Mr Shi took me to a calligrapher’s studio in an ornamental garden; famous, he said. The artist was a stubby, cheerful old man with white hair and glasses. After my introduction, he drew something on good white paper, wielding his brush with wide, confident sweeps. It was for me, Shi said. ‘Beautiful flower; full moon; long life,’ the old man said through Mr Shi, sitting back and indicating the wide or tapering ribbons of black ink. The writing was swift and delicate as a breath; sublime. The ample bar of ‘flower’ thinned perfectly into a mere gossamer connection with the generous circle of ‘full moon’; the sleek, trailing tendril of ‘long life’ led the eye to infinity.

  ‘But flowers die, a full moon wanes,’ I said to Mr Shi. ‘How do they connect with long life?’

  Mr Shi smiled. ‘See – beautiful flower means good person: you. Full moon also means good because the moon is at its full size and without defects: you, again.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s too flattering.’

  He continued, smiling, as if he had not heard me. ‘Longevity is to wish you long life, live long time.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  The old man made a remark and pointed to the character that signified ‘beautiful flower’.

  Mr Shi said, ‘The artist suggests that the character looks like a dragon flying, or a phoenix singing.’ I looked at the character again. It was a bit like a dragon on the wing. About the phoenix singing I wasn’t so sure.

  As we prepared to leave, the old man said to me: ‘Chinese say music is sweet but the sweetest part is after the music ends. So your visit is very good for us, but the memory of it will be even better.’

  All I could do was try to quote Keats correctly: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’

  The old man laughed when Shi translated this. ‘I like that,’ he said, screwing up his eyes. ‘Oh, I like that.’

  *

  On my last morning I walked out along the twenties splendour of the Bund. I wanted to see how long the famous Long Bar really was. At the Tung Feng Hotel a banquet was in preparation. Men in white overalls scurried about carrying trestles, cloths and dishes. Long pointed chandeliers hung down like opalescent elephant tusks. What I supposed to be the Long Bar ran the length of the room, from the tall windows on the Bund to the back wall. A hundred
feet? More?

  ‘Welcome,’ a young waiter said. ‘Beer?’

  When it came, I said, ‘This may be the longest bar in the world.’

  He looked indignant. ‘Not “maybe”. Sure!’

  I strolled back along the river. The water traffic fidgeted; the mournful hooters called to each other. Lines of complacent barges lay along the riverbank, their crew’s bicycles stacked on deck under their awnings. Sen Hai, Ding Yang: the names were painted in English under the Chinese characters.

  A young man stopped me to say, ‘I learn English from radio. Shanghai Radio. Do I speak with Chinese accent or Russian accent?’

  A Chinese accent, I assured him, and he seemed pleased.

  ‘I work in the Medical Centre,’ he said. ‘I am from Hangchow.’

  *

  My final rendezvous in Shanghai. Mr Shi and Jade Dragon were waiting at the hotel to drive me to the airport. Wei Kuen was there, bright-eyed. Ah Po nearly broke my neck with a mighty hug, and gentle Thomas Dor smiled his weary smile. We swore we would meet in Hong Kong. They would return there soon on the Shanghai. I was grateful to Mr Shi, and said I would write to tell him so. He laughed and smoothed his bouncy black hair with his butterfly hands. ‘Ah-ha. Thank you.’ With the flourish of a conjurer producing a dove, he took a small package from his pocket. Inside was a jar. On a label, in English, I saw: ‘Essence of Chicken with Pearl’.

  ‘For long life,’ he said, smiling.