‘Very sad,’ said the brother. ‘She was a nice girl.’
Because there were no other roads I had to backtrack all the way to Kangding, a haul of over 20 hours on some of the most rutted tracks conceivable. The other passengers were Yao peasant women in black hats and funereal dresses. However, the road from Kangding eventually joined an expressway and, for the first time in what seemed like ages, the journey was thereafter swift and smooth.
Chengdu appeared as night fell, the first large city I’d seen since Shanghai, and within an hour the driver had dropped us all off at a nondescript point on the edge of its almighty urban sprawl. It wasn’t ideal. While the other passengers were climbing into waiting cars and speeding off to their homes, I had to work out what to do next. Fortunately, a taxicab appeared, and after some negotiation, we agreed on a price to get me to the city centre and, I hoped, a bed for the night.
The glow of electric lights bounced off the low clouds that were beginning to gather over the city. A light rain was falling and the driver flicked a switch to activate his windscreen wipers, but nothing happened. He thumped the dashboard, which persuaded them to swish back and forth a few times before they halted mid-windscreen, as if pausing for breath, unsure whether to carry on or go back. I felt like that myself. Unsure what to do next, and with only a small slip of paper bearing the name of a university professor in Changsha to go on, I began to sense the enormity of my task. For a start, Changsha was still 1,200 kilometres away.
That being said, my journey was somewhat easier than the one He Zizhen had encountered. Having left Yudu, the long marchers endeavoured to escape Chiang Kai-shek’s superior forces by avoiding Sichuan and heading south then west into the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan. Along the way, in February 1935, He Zizhen gave birth to a baby daughter, who was immediately left with a local family, along with a small amount of money and a few bowls of opium as payment. He Zizhen hardly got a look at the child and never had time to give her a name, such was the marchers’ haste. Then, two months later, a bomb dropped from a reconnaissance aircraft left her with terrible shrapnel injuries to her back and head. She almost died, but somehow pulled through even though the following weeks of her convalescence happened not in the comfort and care of a hospital bed, but on a rough stretcher carried by porters. Mao would not agree to leaving her behind for treatment, and insisted she went with him.
In comparison I had nothing to complain about, but I couldn’t shake the overall feeling of tiredness that began to hinder me. I had been on the road for what seemed like forever, covering enormous distances, often at a snail’s pace. But I knew the problem was more than just physical. A growing sense of doubt was seeping into my consciousness. I needed more than a good night’s sleep, which at least I was sure would come at this lower elevation. I needed something far more primitive, far more basic, something that is essential on any journey. More than ever, I required a gentle touch from the hand of Lady Luck.
In Moxi, the hills go on and on
In central Chengdu, the Gateway Inn provided all the necessities of life: a warm bed and a window — from which I could see the top of Mao’s head in the morning. The mighty statue of him, built in 1969 to a height of 12.26 metres, to match the date of his birthday, had captured my imagination the last time I had wandered through this city almost two decades before. Then, his shadow had fallen over a multitude of cyclists who crowded the roadway to such a degree that if they had stayed still you could have walked across the road on their tightly compacted shoulders. Now the stone giant looked down upon a teeming traffic system where the car ruled and the cyclist was shunted to the side. Exactly what Mao would have felt about this could not be known, though Mao was no enemy of progress — at the height of patriotic fervour during his reign, for example, many of Chengdu’s oldest and most beautiful buildings were torn down to make way for the ‘new China’. Nevertheless, I wondered what he would have thought about the fact that the younger generation of students preferred a computer screen to a book or lecture theatre.
I came across a backstreet Internet café filled with students on chat lines with their friends, playing games and smoking Hongtashan cigarettes, the most popular and cheapest brand in China. Fortunately for me, I was the perfect, alternative form of entertainment. Polite, eager faces pressed towards me with their heavily accented versions of ‘Hello!’ and ‘How are you?’ A seat at a vacant screen was found and a crowd gathered to watch my clumsy attempts at negotiating a Chinese keyboard. Helpful advice eventually steered me to an English version of the homepage I wanted, a Chinese search engine that would reveal more about Changsha University. In the end I needn’t have bothered. Once I’d started typing, the subject of my search brought an immediate outpouring of information. Apparently there was quite a number of students at Chengdu University who were from Changsha.
‘Excuse me,’ said one young voice. ‘I am Hong.’
I turned to face a slim, afro-haired boy who was trying his best to grow a wispy moustache. ‘Why are you interested in Changsha University? It is very small and not very interesting. Chengdu is much better.’
The boy wore purple flared trousers and a gold silk shirt, and hid behind a pair of large dark glasses. If he was trying to look like an Oriental version of a ’70s rock star he was doing a very good job. I told him I was looking for a professor who taught there, but the name on the piece of paper didn’t ring any bells. Very soon, however, the precise nature of my search had reached even the furthest corners of the room and more than a few interesting leads. One of these was particularly exciting. Chengdu University naturally had its own experts on Chinese history, but it just so happened there was also a foreign researcher who was attached to the department, an American no less. Would I like to meet him asked the boy in flared trousers?
‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ I replied.
He looked at me quizzically, head tilted to one side.
‘Very much so,’ I added quickly, and he beamed with delight.
‘English expressions,’ he shrugged. ‘There are so many.’
He went to make a few phone calls and returned a short while later with a broad grin on his face. He had traced the name and number of the American and said I could ring him the next morning and organise a meeting — which meant, he then pointed out, that I was free go out with him and his friends.
‘You like dancing?’ he asked.
Judging by what he was wearing, it was unlikely that Hong was going to be a huge fan of classical ballet or Irish folk dancing. Sure enough, the treat he had in store for me was a long way from anything middle-of-the-road. Soon we were walking down steps into a completely different world. The club was his older brother’s and operated from an underground cellar a block from the Internet café. A neon sign above the door was the only indicator of its existence and we were let in only when someone on the other side of the door had checked us out via a security camera. The door opened automatically, with a resounding click, and we found ourselves in a long corridor with a concrete floor and walls that seemed to stretch ahead forever. Soon, however, the unmistakable thump of dance music came closer and closer, and we rounded a corner and walked up to another heavy security door that was opened for us by an unseen hand. Without missing a step, we were in — and what a place it turned out to be.
Strobe lighting illuminated in brief flashes a wide dance floor on which a crowd of Chengdu’s hip, cool things were going for it. At the rear was a bar where, while my eyes and ears adjusted, my host went and bought some beer. His friends were already grooving to a hypnotic dance track that sounded like German Techno on acid. It was fast and furious, 150 beats per minute, and the dancers’ arms and bodies were a flurry of rhythmic shapes in the dim light. It was amazing, but the wall of sound was intense and I had to retreat as far as possible from the monstrous speaker systems that dominated the back wall. Fortunately, that took me to the bar, where I found Hong. He was shouting into the ear of the bartender and gesturing in my direction. Seconds later w
e were clinking bottles of beer and trying to have a conversation. This would have been hard enough in a nightclub in my own country, but in China it proved to be nigh-on impossible.
Eventually Hong gave up and took me by the arm to a chill-out lounge area behind the bar. It was a blessed respite, perhaps also because the air was suddenly permeated with the smell of marijuana. I was getting high just by breathing, and it wasn’t the only drug doing the rounds. A young girl was snorting coke from her girlfriend’s bare shoulder, before they both floated past me in a fit of giggles. Meanwhile Hong was knocking back shots of tequila and motioned for me to do the same. I had a couple before Cocaine Girl reappeared and, before I knew it, I was being led to the dance floor to try and keep up with the frenetic pace of the music. It was impossible, so I decided the best thing to do was just stand there and let it wash over me, wave upon wave of noise that threatened to turn my brain into mush. Maybe this looked cool (although somehow I doubted it), because quite soon after I was joined by others who also stood stock-still in a zombie-like trance. Perhaps I had just given rise to a new dance, even though it was born more out of pain than inspiration. If so, that was going to be my last contribution for the night. It might have been an hour, but most likely it was a lot less, before I called time on the whole underworld dance adventure. The quiet of the concrete corridor was a welcome relief as I made good my escape, unnoticed by Hong or his friends, and returned the way we had come. It might have been impolite, but the ringing in my ears told me I had no alternative.
The American researcher turned out to be a 28-year-old from Utah; he was called Dale but had a Polish family name.
‘Wozniacki,’ he said, ‘but back home they call me Woz.’
How an American with Polish parents came to be in one of the biggest universities in China teaching English and history was soon explained. He’d attended Vancouver’s University of British Columbia, majoring in Political Science, and had lived in a district called Yaletown. Somehow, in China, this had resulted in the not-so-insignificant misunderstanding that Dale was actually a distinguished graduate of Yale, the Ivy League university. I laughed, which made him flinch.
‘Yeah I know,’ he said somewhat sheepishly. ‘It’s kinda embarrassing. But I don’t want to disappoint these kids. They want to think I’m from Yale Uni, so let ’em. You hungry, by the way? Want to get some noodles?’
We’d met at the entrance to the university, which wasn’t far from a typical open-air food stall. We sat on cane stools at a low wooden table and he ordered for both of us in fluent Mandarin.
‘Hope you like hot food,’ he asked. ‘Sichuan dishes will blow your head off if you’re not careful, but this place is okay.’
While we waited, I explained what, or to be more precise, who I was looking for and he had a number of interesting, if not very pragmatic, ideas. The first was that I simply go to the last place the boy had been seen and look there. I replied that I was just as interested in how people felt about Mao An Hong and his infamous dad, and that the journey en route to that region gave me the opportunity to find out. Having said that, I told him, not many people I’d met so far had been very forthcoming on the topic. I’d had a lot of polite smiles and nods of the head, but not a great deal of significant revelations.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Maybe I can help.’
He gestured to the woman running the restaurant and she came over. Dale pointed at me and spoke to her fluently. She listened intently as she dried her hands on her apron. Occasionally her eyes would dart from him to me, looking me up and down. When he’d finished she was joined by an elderly man with grey hair poking out from under his hat, who’d been listening in on the conversation. The two of them exchanged a few words in such a strong local dialect that even Dale had trouble understanding. Eventually, however, we discovered that the old man had been a Red Guard in his youth and that he had been stationed in Jiangxi province for many years, not far from a place called Jinggangshan. He smiled when I recognised the name of the town and puffed out his chest proudly. Jinggangshan was well known as the birthplace of the Chinese Revolution; the Red Army had hidden from the Nationalists in the surrounding mountains. Mao himself had spent a lot of time there, plotting and scheming to bring down the government. Apparently, at one of the hideouts there was a 700-year-old tree that Mao regularly sat under, sketching out his tactics in the soil between its giant roots. People said the power of this great tree worked through Mao, proving that nature was on the side of the Communists.
When the old man had finished waxing lyrical about the Glorious Revolution, I got Dale to ask if he knew anything of the boy, Little Mao, but again came the same response — a shrug of the shoulders and a shake of the head. It was as if I was chasing something that was of no importance to anyone but me. Surely, I said to Dale, someone must regard a missing child, particularly one fathered by the supreme leader of the Communist Party, as worthy of investigation. He could sense my growing frustration, so he said he would check in the university data banks to see if anything popped up.
‘But don’t get your hopes up,’ he added, sliding a steaming bowl of noodle soup across the table. ‘One thing I do know about the Chinese. When it comes to the history of their Communist Revolution, if what you’re looking for doesn’t fit with the official version of events, and I’m thinking this kid does not, it gets removed from the records pretty quickly. You may as well be searching for a ghost.’
I stabbed my chopsticks into the noodles and stirred them round to let the steam rise like a vaporous apparition.
‘Maybe,’ I said finally, blowing on a mouthful. ‘But even ghosts deserve to have their stories told.’
Dale’s office was a small cupboard of a room next to an actual cupboard that contained the mops the cleaners used on the floors each night. He squeezed in behind his desk and turned on his computer. I noticed a calendar on the wall that his mother had sent him, with pictures of snowy mountains and spring flowers in Vancouver. He said she was Canadian but had married an American academic and they had ended up in Utah, near Salt Lake City.
‘Dad’s a Mormon, Mum is Catholic,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s not an easy mix.’
I asked him if that was why he went to university in Canada and he replied, somewhat sadly, ‘Pretty much. Anywhere, just so long as it wasn’t around the old man. It didn’t help that I’m agnostic.’
Dale started searching through the files and uncovered little of interest. Hunched over the screen, he was going through them saying, ‘Nah’, ‘Nope’, ‘Nada’, ‘Zip’ until, at the bottom of one page, he stopped. There was a brief mention of a Chinese journalist, from a small local paper in the town of Ganzhou in Jiangxi province, who had had a similar interest to mine. I moved round to Dale’s side and peered at the screen. It was in Chinese but there was a colour photo of a slightly worried looking man, about 30 years old, in a white shirt and, next to him, the shoulder of a taller man in a darker, short-sleeved shirt. The photo had been tightly cropped, cutting out the rest of the taller man.
‘This is interesting,’ said Dale, speaking the words slowly as he ran a finger along a line of type. ‘It says the guy in the white shirt is a journalist who was also looking for Little Mao, with some success apparently.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Almost,’ said Dale. ‘It also says there was no evidence to support his theory, so the story had not been taken seriously.’
‘And this was when?’
Dale scrolled to the top and found the date of the article. It was only a few years old.
‘And something tells me,’ said Dale, scrolling back down, ‘that the shoulder in this photo belongs to the person he had found, although someone clearly hasn’t wanted that person in the picture.’
‘You think it’s Mao’s son?’ I asked.
Dale thought for a few seconds and then said, ‘Well, look at this journalist’s face. He looks like he’s quite nervous and anxious, but in a respectful kind of way. As if he’s standing n
ext to an important official.’
‘Like someone older?’
‘Yeah, definitely,’ he said. ‘Respect for your elders is very important to the Chinese, and there’s no question this guy is acting very respectfully.’
It also seemed the article had been edited, with the last paragraph ending prematurely in a way that suggested there might have been more written on the subject, so that was all Dale could glean from it.
I had been given another clue, a place called Ganzhou, but little else. Still, even that was an enormous step forward. I was excited, more than ever before. The fact that someone else had been along this path was thrilling, because it meant there was an actual path. Part of my problem was that it sometimes felt as if I was on a wild goose chase, running after shadows and nothing more. Here at least was proof of something solid and tangible.
Dale stood up and found an atlas of China on his shelf. He flicked open the cover and thumbed through the pages until he came to Jiangxi province, then followed the main road south from Nanchang to Yongxin, then onto a series of much smaller rural roads through Jinggangshan to Ganzhou, which was underlined on the map, signifying a largish town rather than a village. Even more exciting were the two names just above it and to the right: Yudu and Ruijin. These were places of great importance to me because, according to all the history books, it was in this area that Mao had begun the Long March. Pursued by the advancing forces of Chiang Kai-shek, he and his poor, long-suffering wife He Zizhen had departed in great haste. And it was somewhere near these locations that they had left behind their two-year-old son, Little Mao, whom they would never see again.
A Boy of China Page 14