‘Of course,’ he added a few moments later, absent-mindedly rubbing the stump of his little finger, ‘I had to give up playing the organ.’
He went on to describe a love of French classical music, principally Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, the early musical impressionists, and later he would show me an old vinyl recording of Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. His gramophone player no longer worked, but he kept the treasured record nonetheless. It had come from a Catholic missionary in the 1950s, as had the pipe organ that he had played at the missionary’s home in a nearby village. I asked him what had happened to the organ but he didn’t know.
‘Red Guards took it. Maybe it was broken up and used for firewood,’ he said wistfully. ‘During the Revolution the winters were very long and cold.’
By now, the light of day was fading and the temperature in the courtyard had suddenly dropped, causing Hsu to shiver. It was like a chill had risen up from the well and now flowed over our feet. Old man Hsu took me inside his home to where a young woman stood by a wooden chopping block, cleaver in hand as she prepared the evening meal. In my honour Hsu had ordered a chicken to be killed and a special stew made from it called yin-guo, after the ginkgo berries that are its main ingredient. He said the berries would make me strong for my journey ahead.
‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘that the only trees to survive the blast at Hiroshima were ginkgos? They are still alive today, only a kilometre from where the bomb exploded.’
It was dark when we sat down to eat in a small, wood-panelled room off the kitchen, five of us on wooden stools round a Formica-topped table covered in a plastic mat. It was printed with a picture of a mountain valley in autumn, a scene of pastoral calm and tranquillity. With us were Hsu’s grandson and granddaughter-in-law, and the young cook, who still wore her white apron. We slurped our soups noisily, in classic Chinese style, and talked about politics and music. Much to Hsu’s dismay, his granddaughter-in-law was more interested in the Backstreet Boys than Debussy, and so the conversation excluded him while she sought to find out more about the American super-band. I proved something of a disappointment, however, admitting that I didn’t know the title of their comeback album. In fact, I didn’t even know they had split up. Apparently, this was like being unaware that the world had stopped turning. Despite this inexcusable ignorance, she said that at least my presence gave her a chance to practise the English she’d learnt in school. Strangely, her accent was southern-states American, the result of her teacher having lived much of his life in Texas. At regular intervals — usually whenever I didn’t know something about her favourite boy band — she exclaimed, ‘Oh my gawsh!’
Down the other end of the table, Hsu was dropping off to sleep and soon the young cook rose quietly and guided him from the room. The grandson, who hadn’t said a word all evening, let out a yawn. I suddenly realised that all their beds were in the room we were eating in; by staying up I was keeping everyone awake. So I made my excuses and also retired for the night. They gave me a torch and I walked past the goat, still tied to the well, and entered the room allocated to me. Inside was a freshly made bed near a single window that afforded a glimpse of dark water rushing by below. The moon was up and, although not full, its light filled the room, illuminating another door against which someone had pushed the bed. It was locked, but the key was on the window ledge and, although the lock was old, it turned eventually. The door opened inwards to reveal a small windowless room that smelt of hay and goat. The beam of my torch fell upon dusty farmyard equipment, a collection of plastic buckets and, in the corner, partially covered by several layers of sackcloth, a small piece of an old man’s life, in the form of a 21-pipe organ.
Exactly why Hsu had decided not to tell me the truth regarding the instrument was anyone’s guess. Everyone has their secrets after all, the things that really make us who we are, as opposed to those parts of us we choose to have on public display. Perhaps his story of it being broken up for firewood might have been more allegorical, alluding to his hands being busted by the Red Guards, rather than the organ itself.
As I lay on the bed and listened to the wooden house creaking as it cooled down, sinking onto its piles like an old man easing himself into an armchair, I thought about my old man — the one I was looking for, Mao An Hong, son of Mao Senior. If alive, was he doing just that somewhere? Slowly resting his bones for the night, with his own secrets kept safe about him — secrets that, if at all possible, I fully intended to uncover? Was it right or wrong to try to do that? Hsu would not have liked his guest prying into places he was not supposed to see; he would have considered that rude and disrespectful. And yet that was exactly what I was doing: poking around in the dark for some kind of answer to a timeless riddle.
In the morning I was on the road again, this time to Moxi, another sleepy township deep in the wooded mountains that had seen the passing of Mao and his massive entourage of Long Marchers, including a still-grieving He Zizhen.
Under the vaulted roof of an old Catholic church festooned with pink and yellow flowers, I cornered two old ladies and tried to extract some information about what had happened here during the Long March, but despite my repeated questions they would only smile and echo the same apology over and over: ‘Bù zhīdào, bù zhīdào,’ — I don’t know, I don’t know.
I suspected the problem was not just that they didn’t know anything, but that here in the Mao tourist belt I was meeting people (old man Hsu aside) who were groomed to recite a textbook version of events and nothing else. It was maddening to say the least, but not entirely unexpected. The glorification of Mao was always going to be part theatre, part circus. Every house he had been in, every well he had drunk from was sacred ground. In some instances the government authorities had even constructed sites and attached stories to them: ‘On this hilltop fort Mao addressed the Red Army before a battle’, or ‘In this room Mao composed a stirring poem that filled the hearts of his followers with love’. In Moxi, at least the buildings were authentic and, indeed, Mao had stayed here, if only for a few nights to meet with his commanders and plot the next phase of the march.
Beside the church was the house he had slept in, a 1920s stone and timber house with a sweeping tiled roof, each corner of which was turned up like the toe of an Arabian slipper. An elderly guard sat asleep on the front veranda beside a small wooden table that was bare except for an empty teacup and a book of tickets. I cleared my throat but he didn’t wake. The dusty floorboards creaked as I went up a flight of stairs to the dimly lit, sparsely furnished rooms on the second floor. In one, a wooden bed stood in a corner; beneath the only window were a heavy wooden chair and a writing desk. A portrait of the young Mao in uniform looked down from a roughly plastered wall. At the other end of the hallway was a similar room, containing only a rustic wooden table and bench seats under a single, bare light bulb.
I imagined Mao and a few of his fellow leaders — the sly military tactician Zhu De, one of the original leaders of the Communist Party who had defected to Mao with 10,000 of his troops in 1928, and the highly ambitious and mercurial Lin Biao, another defector from the forces of Chiang Kai-shek — seated across the table from each other, deep in conversation about the Nationalist army hot on their trail. It felt as if they had just left the room only moments earlier.
Perhaps it was here Zhu De had devised the four military slogans that helped bring order to the sometimes-ragtag Red Army. Before defecting to the Communists, Zhu was used to the highly trained officers and soldiers he commanded in Chiang Kai-shek’s more disciplined regiments. He would have had no time for disorder or disarray, so he had come up with the pillars of partisan warfare on which the Red Army successfully grew. They were incredibly simple:
When the enemy advances, we retreat.
When the enemy halts and encamps, we trouble them.
When the enemy seeks to avoid a battle, we attack.
When the enemy retreats, we pursue.
Of these two men, however, Lin Biao was possibl
y the more interesting. Secretly, he was known to criticise Mao, believing him to be more in love with himself than the Party. But in public Lin Biao was an outspoken advocate of everything Mao — what he said, what he thought and what he did, including the colossal mistake that was Mao’s Great Leap Forward, an attempt at agricultural reform in the period from 1958 to 1961 that ended with the death from starvation of up to 35 million people. Such was his advocacy that the creation of the ‘cult’ of Mao Tse-tung was sometimes credited to Lin. In many photographs I’d seen, which were later printed onto official Communist Party teacups and plates, there was Mao beside a beaming Lin Biao, who was often clutching a copy of the Little Red Book, the bestselling compilation of the thoughts of the illustrious leader. Lin was famous for saying, ‘I don’t have any talent. What I know, I learnt from Mao.’ You could not have found a more weasel-like politician, but this passivity obviously appealed to Mao and, years later in 1969, as a reward for his devotion, Lin was made second-in-command of the Communist Party. What then transpired, however, is still a matter of conjecture.
Their relationship began to unwind when Lin was accused of calling Mao’s then wife, Jiang Qing, a ‘long-nosed pit viper’, which of course she was, but you just didn’t go around saying that. Mao responded by ‘purging’ known Lin supporters, a common tactic that often ended in the ‘purged’ being led away in chains to some appallingly dark and dingy cell for the rest of their natural lives. In 1971, those who remained, including Lin himself, began planning to kill Mao by sabotaging his train; at the last minute, however, Mao changed his plans and the plot was exposed.
Just over a week later, only two years after being anointed as Mao’s most trusted comrade, Lin Biao came to a sticky end on 13 September, when the plane in which he was escaping to Moscow with his wife and son crashed into the frozen steppes of Mongolia. An eyewitness said the tail was on fire before it hit the ground, which led to the rumour that it had been shot down. The Party said that the word of a Mongolian herdsman was not to be trusted and that the plane had simply run out of fuel. Shortly afterwards however, over 1,000 people connected with Lin were arrested and the ‘Lin Biao Incident’, as the whole episode came to be known, was confined to history.
But what Mao didn’t realise was that with Lin gone, so too was the voice that had for so long heartily sung his praises. Mao’s mistakes and excesses through the decades were now being roundly criticised by the Communist Party faithful — and there was no one left to defend him. In this way, Mao’s eventual fall from grace through the rest of the 1970s was partly his own doing.
The guard downstairs had woken and been alerted to my presence by the two old ladies from the church. I took some photos of the rooms and went back downstairs to leave, belatedly buying a ticket as I did so. The text was all Chinese and there was no English translation, as was the case in the guidebook the guard produced from a drawer in his table — proof that this was not a place that expected to attract much foreign interest. As I turned to go, he put out his hand and gestured that I give him something; not money, he said, but the notebook I’d shown to the two ladies earlier, the one that described in Mandarin the mission I was on, which they had obviously told him about. The two women pointed to my shoulder bag and smiled. Perhaps, I mused, as I unzipped it and withdrew the book, I’d been wrong about them after all.
With his heavily veined and wrinkled hands, he fumbled with the pages until he found the one he was looking for. Slowly his eyes went back and forth, taking in each line with much concentration. Finally, after some thought, he pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose and took a pen out of his drawer. Then, with some difficulty, he turned to a fresh page and began to write. For some weeks this text would stay in my notebook, almost forgotten, a spidery scrawl of black, strange-looking characters, until I could find someone who spoke English well enough to translate it for me. It turned out he’d written an old Chinese proverb that went something like this: Near to rivers, we recognise fish; near to mountains, we recognise the songs of birds. It took me a while to fathom these words, but in the end I realised their meaning. He was referring to my search for information on Little Mao, and telling me where best to find it. Underneath this he’d written the name of a town.
It was Yudu.
TWELVE
TAKING A SHORT CUT IN CHINA IS NOT ALWAYS TO BE RECOMMENDED. From Moxi, I thought I would be clever and take one of the back roads through Shimian to the town of Wusihe, which would then provide a fast route to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Only, the woman at the bus station in Shimian said the journey onwards to Wusihe was impossible because mudslides had wiped out the road. Outside the sun shone brightly from an azure blue sky. How could there be mudslides when there was no rain, I said to her, but she was in no mood for argument and shut the ticket office door on me. Feeling bullish, I persuaded a taxi driver to take me as far along the road as possible. ‘Hah,’ I thought to myself, as I jumped into the front passenger seat. ‘I’ll show her.’
Ten kilometres on and the road had indeed turned to a muddy slush. Clouds came from nowhere and a light rain was soon falling that gradually increased to a downpour. Every so often we had to veer round large rocks that had fallen from the cliff somewhere high above us on the left, while on the right the turbulent Dadu River ran parallel to our course. We were hemmed in by fragile rocks and raging water. Still, I confidently mused, this was nothing compared to the hair-raising roads I had already endured coming down from the soaring peaks of Qinghai. So we pressed on regardless, albeit at a suitably sedate pace. It was only when the windscreen wipers packed it in that I began to reconsider the situation. It had been hard enough to see the way forward when they were working, never mind through the veil of water that poured down the glass in great, uninterrupted torrents when they stopped. The only thing to do now was to turn back.
But even that was easier said than done. Managing a U-turn on that narrow piece of roadway involved me getting out in the rain and directing the taxi driver backwards and forwards, a few centimetres at a time, until we were finally pointing in the opposite direction. Then we slowly headed back towards Shimian. But the Law of Murphy was now working overtime and bad was turning to worse. No sooner had we turned the next corner than a rockslide came into view that threatened to cut off our retreat. Rocks the size of tennis balls were still rolling down the slope, indicating that the slide had only just happened, and occasionally something larger crashed past and hit the ground then bounced over the edge to smash into the river 20 metres below. The question was, if we waited, would the slide only get worse and soon cover the road completely? The driver inched us forward. Clearly he was opting for Plan B, which was to attempt to ride over the rubble while at least two wheels could still be in contact with firm ground.
I remembered long before being in Afghanistan in the back of a captured Russian troop carrier with a group of swarthy Afghan mujahedeen, about to run the gauntlet of a stretch of dusty road that was within mortar range of a government position. In such a situation, atheists might cross their fingers or touch a lucky charm around their neck. Christians might cross themselves and repent their sins. But these men were Muslims and the murmur that went through the group that day was a prayer to Allah that we would stay safe. However, as the shells exploded behind, ahead and on either side of us, I instead put my faith in the driver of the truck, who knew exactly what he was doing as he continually altered our path, swerving closer to the fort and then away, never giving the gunners a consistent range to work with.
Now, in a similar situation but in a different country, I was about to do that again. This driver, whose name I didn’t know and who naturally didn’t know mine, advanced with growing speed towards the ramp of earth and rock and suddenly we were on what felt like a 40-degree angle, riding up and over the slip, the wheels spinning frantically as they sought to grip. My head hit the roof as we bounced into the air, then I was thrown to the side and back again — I remember looking down upon the Dadu River and t
hinking how cold and menacing it looked. With nothing to hang onto, I felt like I was in a pinball machine, getting whacked from all sides. For a brief moment we almost stopped, as the car tipped forward and the rear wheels hung uselessly in the air — the thought struck me that a puncture right now would possibly be the end of us — but then, with an almighty thud, they touched back down, the driver changed to a lower gear and, when I next opened my eyes, we were on clear, level road again.
The driver whistled through gritted teeth, then patted the steering wheel affectionately. If this man had a god, it was quite possibly the God of Motor Mechanics, whose good grace had just allowed us to pass.
A few hours later, drenched and a little bruised, but at least in one piece, we rolled back into Shimian. That was when the driver told me what had happened just a few months before. A minibus from a rival company had been lost to the same turbulent, brown waters that flowed down through the valley. Its driver had survived, but one of his two passengers, a French backpacker on holiday with her boyfriend, had not.
The next day I met the minibus driver in question. His mother ran the upstairs hostel beside the bus station where I was staying, while his brother sold cellphones from the little shop below it. The minibus driver worked for both of them, these days preferring a job behind a desk rather than a steering wheel. I asked him to tell me how the accident had happened, but he shook his head and looked away. His brother, however, was more forthcoming. He told a story of a rainy morning with the river at its peak, filled with the snowmelt of early spring, and how the tourists had paid double to get to Wusihe — they had a connecting flight home from Chengdu to catch and were desperate not to miss it. But somewhere along the way, while the minibus was squeezing past a truck going in the opposite direction, the road had given way under its wheels, plunging it into the torrent and filling it with water instantly. The driver and the Frenchman had been swept out through the shattered remains of the front windscreen and barely made it to the riverbank. But within seconds the current had spun the bus around 180 degrees and the full force of the river had then poured through the minibus, pinning the Frenchwoman to the rear seat.
A Boy of China Page 13