It was chilly outside and the plain warm flat offered Wally and Jin Juan the luxury of a private, peaceful space. She rolled the dumplings with nimble fingers, pinching them tight, and made him copy. But his fell open in the boiling water. The dumplings steamed in a large dish between them, and they had a saucer each of vinegar and a glass of cognac to sip. They played question and answer about China, Wally’s sense of the positive things encircling Jin Juan’s negatives as in a game of Go. Wally had already made backdoor inquiries about her possible job transfer to the Medical College.
Those days were happy. Her alliance with the Doctor was noted by the College authorities and protected her. He was drawing her into the circle of privilege. She could come and go as she pleased, and, although she wasn’t indiscreet, she stayed with him when he wanted her. He had arrived somewhere at the end of his haphazard quest, and threw himself into work with his colleagues, his satisfaction made headier by the approach of departure. What he had arrived at was Jin Juan, the feel of her intelligence, her body, her attentiveness, her Sui dynasty aloofness, head arched away. He saw a future.
They were replete with dumplings. The curtains were drawn and dusk closing in. As they sprawled dishevelled on the bed he began talking, as he had several times, of the practical problems of taking her to Australia with him. He wanted to plan the strategy move by move. Implicit in the plan was his proposal of marriage, the firmness of which Jin Juan recognised. The future for him was now a logical line. For her such a line, like the ruler at school, spoke of coercion, a willed dream. But not interrupting she curled against him like a cat, her face golden in the dim light, her sharp chin tilted upwards, her curving eyes glittering.
She had tested him and he had proved steadfast, to her and her grandfather. And there was their joy together. Director Kang, to safeguard himself against discovery, had for years now kept her out of the Medical College. Kang feared Hsu Chien Lung’s granddaughter. Knowing her involvement with young Zhang, Kang could also do his part to prevent her alliance with so powerful a family by keeping her out of a respectable job. Kang knew from discussions with Zhang’s father, his patient, that the family would look down on a middle-school teacher with no connections. So Kang’s motives had been several in blocking Jin Juan’s way; and in a similar way, Jin Juan recognised, her motives in coming to the foreigner were mixed.
On this winter’s day she left Wally before the gates closed, took the bus, and walked the last stretch of slippery track that led to her dormitory. The duck’s-down hood was tight around her glowing cheeks. A car was parked outside. Zhang was waiting for her.
‘When did you get back? You haven’t been in touch.’ He tried to look concerned, but his irritation showed.
‘Come in,’ she said energetically. ‘I’ve been busy since I came back. There is some business to do with my grandfather.’
‘Is that all?’ He examined her suspiciously.
‘I’m planning to change my job to become an interpreter at the Medical College.’
‘You don’t look much different. There are no problems, I trust.’
She weighed him up in return as they went into the dormitory. As he had grown older and more successful, he had become more bound, an agent of Party attitudes, or feudal attitudes. His self-interest no longer chafed against orthodoxy. What was right, what maintained the system of power, was right for him. So he had come to her like an investigator.
‘I hear you’ve been hanging round with the foreigner. What’s that all about?’
‘Does it matter?’
Her colour rose, not from shame but anger.
‘What’s your relationship with him?’
‘Actually I think he wants to marry me.’
Zhang snorted. ‘They’re always looking for our women.’
‘He’s quite serious.’
‘Well, maybe it’s a good opportunity, but you couldn’t come at that, could you?’ He was so cool Jin Juan could have scratched him. He took her hand. ‘Even if there wasn’t our situation. Are you all right? How’s the little problem?’
She pulled her hand away. ‘It’s never been your problem.’
Across his smooth, smug face passed a quiver of perplexity.
‘I got rid of it,’ she said.
‘What!’
‘It might not have been your problem,’ she repeated.
At once he saw her meaning, in a grotesque vision of violation, alien blood mixing with his seed in a witch’s crucible, producing a monster. He slapped her viciously and she fell back on the bed, covering her head. ‘Go!’ she ordered.
He stood, legs apart, and put his nose in the air. ‘I don’t want your stinking cunt. Marry the foreigner, get your passport and leave.’
She sat straight up. Her head was aching and her cheeks smarted. She rose to her feet, shaking as she faced him, and said, ‘I don’t have to listen to you any more.’
5
Wally got a polite pressing invitation from Mother Lin explaining what had happened and urging him to visit. He had not seen Eagle since the summer and was embarrassed that his own affairs had come to preoccupy him so entirely. Eagle was one of the brightest, most uncomplicated people he had met in China. Wally was distressed to hear that things were as bad as the letter suggested. He had not known of the injury. As soon as he was free, he jumped on his bike and rode the short distance to the house near the station. As on previous visits Mother Lin spied him first from the tiny kitchen.
‘He’s come! He’s come!’
She led the Doctor inside. There was Eagle, who blinked and grinned in surprise. He was lying on his side under a quilt on the platform bed, in a crimson sporting shirt. But he had not been exercising. He was thin and sallow, his eyes sunken, his hair flat and lustreless. When he smiled to the visitor, he gave off that air of panicky impatient exhaustion that comes with sickness.
Mother Lin was babbling about her son’s condition.
‘You tell me yourself,’ said Wally to the boy. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I can’t walk.’ He was apologetic. ‘I had an accident playing basketball. The doctor said I should rest and it would heal. Now I can’t walk at all.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
Eagle wore several layers of loose pyjamas under the quilt. The pyjamas were damp with perspiration and the bedclothes were smelly. He had lain there many weeks.
The leg in question was swollen around the knee. It was years since Wally had carried out such a physical examination. Eagle winced when the Doctor pressed the knee, and couldn’t oblige when he was asked to move it. The leg was unable to bend.
When Wally made him stand, Eagle’s face screwed up in pain. He managed to laugh as he hopped about the room on his good leg. But the difficulty was too great when he tried to walk normally.
Mother Lin produced her usual excessive meal, fussing over Wally while Eagle picked without interest. He was thoroughly deflated. The Doctor’s visit had lifted his spirits a little but for stretches he reverted to those hollow inward starings. He felt victimised. He had fought his difficulties courageously, taking an active, determined role, using self-discipline and a disgust for self-pity as means to his ends. He had regained his place on the team. He had re-established his understanding with Pearl, on track again in the task of getting a decent flat for his old and ailing mother. And now the misfortune of his injury was compounded by its incurability. He had rested, he had eaten the good food his mother slaved to prepare, he had taken the expensive medicines his brother had bought. But the situation was hopeless. The Sports Institute denied him its superior medical attention. Pearl had taken the accident as a well-timed omen. And now Eagle’s strength was draining out of him. More than once he had discussed with his mother the idea of calling the Doctor, but he had always dismissed it as something not right, as if he should bear his fate alone. It was his mother who acted, since her duty was to use any connection that might help her beloved son. Wally was thankful she had done so. He would help if it lay in his po
wer.
‘You’ll have to go to hospital,’ he concluded, ‘for further examination. My guess is that the knee will have to be opened up. A tricky business.’
Mother Lin panted, her hand on her heart. The obstacles that lay in the way were beyond explaining to the foreigner. Eagle reverted to his dull stare.
‘The doctors say I should rest here,’ said Eagle flatly. ‘They say I do not need further treatment.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I’m not eligible.’ Wally saw what his part was to be. The operation—the reshaping of the knee, the resetting of the bones, the process of cartilage healing—was long, complicated and expensive. In China medical treatment of a high quality was in short supply. Access was a privilege. The underpaid medical profession was compensated, to an extent, by its power over the distribution of the privilege. He had been in China long enough now to have a crude understanding of how the system worked. He had his trump card. Immediately an appointment should be made with Mrs Gu, and through her a meeting requested with Director Kang.
He rubbed Eagle’s shoulder warmly and shook Mother Lin’s hands, giving his word that he would return.
So it was that two days later a car sent from the College arrived at the entrance to the narrow hutong and Eagle was laid carefully on the back seat.
Mrs Gu, recognising the Doctor’s determination, had wasted no time in setting up a meeting with Director Kang. Wally had so far kept his discoveries secret from the College, though he assumed that Song knew, and that through her some information would leak out, which would not hinder his purpose. He need do no more than allude subtly to his bargaining point.
The meeting with Kang was amiably circuitous, the easy manner helped by the Director’s muting of his habitual excessive humour. There were compliments, inquiries after health, regrets that they had not seen more of each other, expressions of unavoidable commitments and healthy reports from both sides on the state of research, and a profession of sadness from the Director, polishing his brow, that the Professor Doctor must soon be leaving their College. Director Kang insisted that if the Professor Doctor, a man of such wide experience, had any suggestions for improvements in the running of the College, then he must be frank. And if there was anything, anything, that the Director could do to assist …
The offer appeared to play too close to Wally’s ulterior motives, so he substituted a lesser request. ‘As a matter of fact—’ and went on to explain how in his opinion the College suffered not from any deficiency in medical expertise but from being a little under par linguistically. To put it bluntly, there was no one with adequate capacities as technical translator and interpreter. The matter was essential if the College was to keep abreast of outside research and if its own attainments were to be truly recognised by the medical fraternity at large. In short, the authorities should appoint a person with sufficient English-language ability and if possible a medical background, preferably someone young and energetic, with a commitment to the work of the College. This should not be regarded as a low priority, but of prime importance, and the College should endeavour to find someone of high ability by offering suitable enticements.
That was Wally’s bid.
Not understanding what he was getting at, the Director nodded with a practised combination of general approval and specific disengagement. It was possible, after all, that the foreigner was making a disinterested suggestion that could safely be ignored, sensible idea though it was.
Talk of translation allowed Wally to introduce the topic of rewarding medical reading, how enormously he had profited from studying Kang’s papers—congratulations—and how even those in Chinese had been illuminating once a translation was made by a linguist friend who happened to be researching at the Traditional Medicine Academy—and by a further happy chance the archives of the Academy had proved to house fascinating unpublished papers by the same Professor Hsu Chien Lung whom Wally had been seeking.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Wally, ‘I finally did track down the old Professor over the summer.’
‘You visited him?’ Kang laughed. ‘Ho-ho-ho! I didn’t know.’
‘He sends his regards. Anyway—’ and with an abrupt change of subject, so the connection would be clear, Wally made his higher bid. He wanted a room for Eagle in the best part of the hospital, where the high cadres go, and he wanted the best orthopaedic surgeon in Beijing in attendance as soon as possible.
It was perhaps a more difficult request than Wally realised, and Kang became more thoughtful as Wally described Eagle as ‘his friend’—who proved to be an unemployed worker with no status at all, a person the Doctor should never have known.
But it was too late now. ‘I vouch entirely for the genuineness of the person and the case,’ said Wally, ‘and I will regard your help as a personal favour to me.’
Kang looked unhappy as he promised to make inquiries immediately.
‘I hope you’ll be successful, and quickly,’ concluded Wally, who made as if to stand, then sat again for his last statement.
‘By the way, I learned less from old Professor Hsu than I had hoped. He’s quite lucid. But when I leave China and write up the results of my medical experience here, I suppose I won’t have anything to say on that score—a pity—since all over the world, at every conference, people are asking about what goes on in Chinese medicine. Anyhow, I mustn’t keep you. You’ve got phone calls to make. Let’s get together again soon. Oh, will you let me know through Mrs Gu as soon as possible—about my friend?’
6
In the autumn of the year a disparate chorus of voices was raised for democracy. The workers were complaining about rate rises. The Reforms had loosened a few screws in the economy and income had not kept up with inflation, nor spending money with rising expectations. In Shanghai a chemicals factory burned to the ground while the workers passively watched. They recognised the new face of exploitation. Middlemen grumbled that the Reforms were not moving fast enough and that bureaucratism strangled opportunity. Each day China seemed to slip further from its grandiose goals. But hope persisted. Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a hundred schools of thought contend! appealed the Party, enticing people to speak their blueprints for the future. Blinking like tortoises, they stuck their necks out.
In an environment of optimism the students nurtured hopes as dazzling as the grand propaganda dreams of their parents’ generation. They grew their hair and pirated videos of ‘We Are The World, We Are The Children’. They experimented with new notions of romance, sexuality, psychoanalysis, existentialism and democracy. They planned to get rich by doing Chinese computer programs for IBM. Either they must change their country or it would change them. If the curve of hope continued upwards, they would be the generation to make China open-minded, scientific, modern. They would put the Chinese in space. They had a slogan, ‘Break out of Asia, advance on the world.’ And in the autumn of that year, it might almost have been possible.
On Saturday afternoons throughout the city, salons for democracy were held. Items on the agenda included: modern management techniques; cybernetics and systems theory; artistic individualism; an independent press; the separation of Party and government. People talked their heads off.
At one salon Philosopher Horse was invited to speak. Transformed, as his fame had gone before him, he gave a rousing address which had a packed crowd of Beijing Teachers College students clapping and chanting. He argued against Marx and for Nietzsche, asserting the power of the individual will to recast the world. Nietzsche’s texts were a new bible, the other path.
Bizarrely they chanted: ‘What do we want? Nietzsche! What do we need? Nietzsche!’
At the end of the speech Philosopher Horse produced a thick bundle of mimeographed sheets. He announced that he had formed his own political organisation. The document laid down some basic principles. It appealed to the spirit of Wei Jingsheng who was still imprisoned for demanding the Fifth Modernisation, Democracy, without which the Four Technological Modernisations could never b
e achieved. ‘Let us try to discover by ourselves what is to be done,’ quoted Philosopher Horse.
The leaflets were eagerly grabbed. And as he left the seat, he called out the name of his invented party:
‘Defend the People!’
The phrase raced around the salon.
‘Defend the People!’
In early December in Shanghai tens of thousands of students and workers assembled in the People’s Square. There had been nothing like it for a decade.
7
Clarence joined the Beijing press in the rush to Shanghai. In the afternoon, as he was running to catch the taxi, a letter from Autumn arrived at the office.
Dear Clarence,
It is already two months since I left Beijing. I have recently passed my twenty-first birthday. According to the regulations it is permissible to volunteer for the army between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. I have decided to become a soldier. It is a good opportunity. Shovelling coal at the Vehicle Plant is too hard and the pay is too little. The army will give me the opportunity to study and to see other places. I am also happy to help the motherland. The fitness training is already over. Soon we move, and I will learn to use a typewriter and to drive a car. It’s real fun.
After I left Beijing I needed to return to my village to get approval to enlist. I had a health check, then joined the army in the county town. I had no opportunity to return to Beijing to farewell you. Excuse me.
We two have different nations, different languages, different backgrounds. Our friendship has left a deep impression on me. You have treated me with respect and kindness. There is genuine love between us and I miss you ardently. But I do not think you can take me with you to your country. It is an impossible dream. We two must travel our separate roads. For this reason I have decided to join the army. In the barracks I dream of you. I imagine you by my side. In the future perhaps we will meet again.
I hope your health is good. I hope your life goes smoothly. I wish all things may go as your heart desires.
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