‘Inshallah.’
He was in his late twenties and a Turkic Muslim from Xinjiang. Unlike those of the more slightly built Han Chinese, his arms and thighs were thick and stretched the fabric of his suit. He smelt of aftershave and garlic, a combination that, in this heat, was most pungent. I rummaged in my pockets and found a roll of mints.
‘For you,’ I said.
He took one and I gestured for him to take more.
‘I have plenty,’ I lied.
‘Tesekkur,’ he said — ‘thank you’ in Turkish.
Tong was a specialist in sanitation, on his way to a conference in a big hotel. Normally he would have flown, but Ruijin’s airport was closed. I asked him why he had a Chinese surname and he told me his mother was Uighur and his father was from Shanghai. Mixed marriages would have been almost unheard of 30 years earlier, but now the richer, better-educated Han were taking a fancy to the pretty Turkic girls, with their fine white skin. Tong’s mother had left home at 19 and travelled to the big eastern cities looking for work, but found love instead.
‘So you speak Turkish, Chinese and English,’ I exclaimed.
‘German too,’ he smiled, rolling the mints around in his mouth and smoothing down the lapels of his jacket. ‘Turkish is for family, Chinese for living and German is for business.’
‘What about English?’
‘That’s for travelling the world. Anywhere you go, all hookers speak it.’
The bus hit a pothole and the people in the back shrieked as they launched into the air. Tong leant in closer and pointed at me with a finger that bore a gold ring.
‘Have you been to the South Pacific?’
‘A few times.’
‘Ah, I saw on TV, right now there are thousands of sperm whales swimming past the islands. Why is it that they are called sperm whales? I know, is it because they have . . . ?’
He curved both arms out in front of him, as if he was holding a large barrel on his lap, and then laughed at his own joke. All I could think of was that nine hours squeezed between Tong and the window was going to be hard work, but after a while he excused himself and dozed off.
I lapsed in and out of sleep as well. Once I woke to see a horrible devil’s face reflected in the window glass. Children’s voices within the bus punctuated the constant rumble of rubber on road. Next moment the mask was removed and a boy’s face smiled angelically.
We stopped to eat fried noodles at a food stall on the side of the road, beneath tarpaulins held up by bamboo poles. When it grew dark, kerosene lamps were lit and hung from wires overhead, casting an eerie yellow light over our weary group. Tong went off to pray somewhere quiet and returned seemingly refreshed, as if the act of prayer had washed him clean. Families talked together in hushed tones, strangers kept to themselves and everyone, no matter who they were, watched and waited for the driver to finish his meal and signal that it was time to board again.
Back on the bus, Tong soon grew bored. He had struck on the idea that we should become good friends and he invited me to join him at his hotel in Ganzhou. We would eat and drink together, and when he wasn’t at the conference he would show me the ancient walls of the city.
‘They are quite magnificent,’ he said. ‘Twenty feet thick in places.’
I agreed only so that he might let me rest some more.
When we eventually arrived at Ganzhou late that night, he grabbed my bag and ushered me into a waiting taxi. The hotel was five-star, he boasted.
‘Best prostitutes in Jiangxi province.’
Actually the hotel was nice and my room, blissfully on a different floor from Tong’s, was the best I’d seen in China. It even had Internet, cable TV and an en suite bathroom. I lay on the bed and pondered my next move. On a piece of paper in my pocket was the name of a man in Ganzhou who, according to Wang, knew the truth about Mao’s son. Finding one man in a city of eight million was going to be challenging, but I also knew he was linked to the police in some way. That narrowed the field massively, surely. If I could persuade Tong to do some ringing around for me, perhaps Zhou Fung Mu might not be so hard to track down.
I put the proposal to him over breakfast the next morning and he almost choked on his tea.
‘Talk to the police?’
‘It’s just a phone call.’
‘In China, that’s not a good idea.’
‘Why?’
‘You ask questions of them, they start asking questions of you. And when they ask questions you’d better have the answers.’
‘I’ll pay,’ I said, putting things on a business footing I knew he’d understand. ‘Name your price.’
Tong drained the remnants of the soup from his bowl and fished out an errant piece of food from his teeth. He glanced up at a clock above a fish tank filled with lobsters, before his gaze drifted further to the main foyer.
‘See her?’ he asked.
I looked and saw a strikingly attractive woman in a dark pencil suit, sitting by herself.
‘You buy me her and we have a deal. Two phone calls.’
‘I can’t buy this woman,’ I protested.
‘She’s a prostitute. Of course you can. You’ll just be buying her for me.’ Tong grinned and held out his hand to shake on it.
I paused. This was verging on the bizarre. I hoped my wife would understand.
‘Eight phone calls,’ I said.
‘Three,’ he countered.
‘Seven. Last offer.’
‘Four.’
‘Six. Take it or leave it.’
‘Five.’
‘Done.’
We shook hands. His conference started soon after, but he’d be free in the afternoon to fulfil his end of the bargain. At night he’d collect payment, he said. Room 402. In my effort to get things moving, I’d been unwittingly transformed into a high-class pimp.
After tidying myself up a little, I sat down opposite the woman on a large black sofa and picked out a Chinese magazine from the rack. She paid little attention to me, as with her slender fingers she flicked through the emails on her phone. For a moment I began to think Tong had been wrong in his estimation of her profession, in which case I was about to get a slap in the face. I turned the page of the magazine and coughed loudly, but still got no response. I started to hum a tune and realised it was a song from The Sound of Music. Hardly appropriate in the circumstances, but nonetheless effective: she looked me dead in the eye and smiled.
‘Hot,’ I said, glancing towards the doors leading outside and using the magazine as a fan.
She glanced that way also and replied in Mandarin that tomorrow could be hotter still.
‘Rain?’ I suggested.
She gave me a look that said she thought a light shower was possible. I was doing famously. Temperature, precipitation — great conversation topics for finding out if a woman is on the make or not.
I was desperately trying to think up a tactful way to broach the subject of her social calendar when she beat me to it. Leaning forward she slipped her card across the table between us. On it was a black silhouette of a woman in thigh-high boots holding a whip. The trailing end curled at her stilettoed feet like a snake. Tong was going to be in for one hell of a surprise, I mused.
Eventually, the room number, time, duration and fee were all sorted out in reception with hardly a word more being spoken. She was charming and professional; to be honest I’d had more difficulty buying lunch in the past. It was cash up front, though — and ‘no funny business’.
Job done, and a few hours later Tong was in my room with the phone in his hand, dialling through to reception. He asked for the number of the central police station.
‘Is there a problem?’ came the reply from the receptionist.
‘No, no,’ answered Tong, and then as an afterthought, ‘at least, not at the moment.’
He was put through various channels until, clearly, he had reached someone of rank. Pleasantries were exchanged, which is a very Muslim thing to do, although I wondered if the Han Chinese policeman at the
other end would normally have bothered. Delicately, Tong broached the subject of Zhou Fung Mu and whether he still worked for the department. There was no recollection of that name. Tong looked at me and held his hand over the receiver.
‘Are you sure he was chief of police?’
That’s what Wang had said. There was no reason for him to lie.
‘What about the PSB?’ I asked finally, referring to the Public Security Bureau. They were hard-line police, acting on major criminal investigations: murder, rape, hijacking, business fraud. Tong swallowed hard and continued the conversation, but now he was answering more questions than he was asking. Once more, he put his hand to the receiver.
‘They’re curious to know why you are looking for this man.’
I couldn’t tell them the truth. So I made up something on the spot.
‘Tell them a distant relative has died and left him some money.’
‘How much?’
‘A million yuan.’
Tong shook his head. ‘Too little. Make it ten,’ he said.
While this didn’t exactly dampen their curiosity, it did enough to get them to be more helpful — everyone likes a happy inheritance story. The police gave Tong the name and extension number of someone at the PSB, but when we got through to him the name Zhou Fung Mu still drew a blank. I was two calls down and none the wiser.
‘Maybe he retired,’ said Tong.
‘Maybe, but even a retired chief of police would still be remembered.’
Afterwards, I sat in my room alone, feeling miserable. It was getting dark outside. At least someone was smiling, I thought, two floors up in room 402. To shake this particularly graphic mental image out of my head, I imagined how simple this search would be back in my own country. If you wanted to find anyone, you just sat in front of a computer and searched. Seconds later you’d be looking at either their Facebook page, their Twitter site, their Tumblr feed, or any number of other social-media channels. There was a myriad of ways to locate a person, all thanks to the great and mighty Google. If only, I thought, there was something like that in . . .
‘Oh my God,’ I said out loud. ‘Baidu!’
My back pocket still contained Xu Qing’s email address. I went downstairs to where there was a free Internet café, logged on to Hotmail and sent her a quick message. Like any good teenager, she was online and responded within 15 minutes. Her reply was emphatic. In the subject line it read: Found him!
Underneath was a link to a small paragraph from a Ganzhou newspaper, honouring the retirement of the city’s most senior traffic officer, Mr Zhou Fung Mu, after a lifetime of service. Xu Qing had translated the most important facts and put them in her email. He had, she wrote, retired 10 years ago and now lived in an apartment block that housed important government figures. She knew this because on Baidu there was another story of a retired traffic police chief winning first prize at the Ganzhou Home for Retired Servicemen’s annual flower show.
I wrote back asking if there was a picture and she said there was, but only of the winning plant, a rare pink camellia.
Signing off, she wrote, ‘Good luck!’
Making her way home as evening falls, near Yudu
TWENTY-ONE
IN THE MORNING, ON A CLEAR, BLUE, CLOUDLESS DAY, IT WAS raining: water dripped from hundreds of air-conditioning units mounted on the outer walls of buildings and fell upon the footpaths. Commuters either ducked and dodged the drops or carried umbrellas. I opted for the former approach and found my way to the city’s battlements on the banks of the river Gan. It was dammed upstream by a weir and the surface was so still that a pontoon bridge had been constructed across it. Men with carts transported coal bricks along its length, destined for Ganzhou’s restaurant kitchens. Zigzagging between them came a man on a moped with a baby at his feet, facing backwards in a car seat.
Behind me in a park, old men and women performed their tai chi, as if waltzing with invisible partners. Interestingly, these slow, precise movements are taught to the very young using a rhyme:
I have all this. (Arms out in front, palms up.)
Some for him. (Moving weight to the left and appearing to make an offering.)
And some for him. (Moving right and repeating the gesture.)
Now, nothing (‘mei ola’) do I have. (Returning to the centre, palms up, ready to begin again.)
I had discovered the location of the retirement home, which was a bus ride away on the outskirts of town. The bus stop was down by the river and eventually I found the right bus and climbed aboard. I showed the address to the driver and he nodded assuredly. We then travelled south, over the river and through a dirty industrial precinct that belched steam and smoke, until row upon row of apartment buildings came into view. The driver gestured for me to get off and pointed to the nearest one.
The exterior was dotted with the obligatory air-con units as well as washing lines on every floor, festooned with assorted knickers, pants and singlets that floated in the warm, uprising air. I found the entrance and scanned the letterboxes, hoping to see something I could recognise. Nothing stood out, however, although at least this early reconnoitre meant I knew where to come the next day, when Tong would be free to act as translator again. He was in my debt still and, given the huge grin he had worn over breakfast, I had no doubt he would be up for it.
I decided to walk back into town, sticking to the back streets as much as possible. Along the way I came across an old hotel where a wedding was taking place. Someone had set off firecrackers in the main lobby and the deafening noise drew me to its door. At that moment the bride and groom, she resplendent in her shiny white dress and he in a smart grey suit, emerged and ran past me giggling to a next-door supermarket. Moments later, they returned, proudly waving a box of condoms. I was invited to join the line-up for the wedding photographs, forevermore a strange outsider in a photo album, tacked on the end of a raucous, cheering mob. When the disco music started and the line dancing began, I slunk out the back and continued to the river, crossing over via the pontoon bridge. The wind had risen suddenly and was quite strong, whipping up whitecaps on the water and sending small waves crashing against the side of the bridge, so that it bent in the middle. People carrying large cane baskets on their heads took them down and carried them protectively, in case they were ripped from their grasp. At one point an even more ferocious squall came through and formed a mini-tornado right in front of me, which caught at my clothing and stung my eyes. I ducked down on the planks and stayed there for what seemed an age as the tempest roared around me. It was so strong that it picked up a small goat and tossed it into the river; fortunately, it was still tied to its owner by a slender rope, and was eventually hauled back onto the bridge.
Later that night at the bar, I said to Tong, ‘What about that wind?’
‘What wind?’ he asked, a little bemused. ‘Today has been beautiful.’
TWENTY-TWO
THE RETIRED POLICEMAN WAS WATCHING TV FROM HIS ARMCHAIR beside an open window. A breeze blew the lightweight curtains out towards him and the fabric caressed his slippered feet. He didn’t look up but kept his eyes fixed on the screen, which was showing a news report. The reporter was on the coast and a grey, wind-whipped sea reared up behind her. There were people in high-visibility jackets and an ambulance parked with its lights flashing.
I stood for a full minute before asking Tong what was happening.
‘A typhoon hit Fujian province two days ago. Many fishermen lost their lives, but one has been found floating out in the sea.’
‘In his boat?’
Just then the reporter began talking to a small, wiry, exhausted-looking man with grey stubble on his chin. He had a blanket round his shoulders and was being helped into the ambulance by two policemen. She managed to thrust her microphone at him and he looked startled momentarily, before finding the strength to smile at the camera and speak. It was as if he’d been waiting to tell his story and now, at last, he had an audience.
‘No,’ Tong replied. �
�It’s a miracle. The fisherman says he clung to a branch for a day after the storm, but then it began to sink under his weight. On the second day the dolphins came.’
‘Dolphins?’
I looked at the screen and, as if on cue, the old man being interviewed nodded his head and smiled a gap-toothed smile. His hand appeared from under the blanket and grabbed the microphone shakily, so that he could speak more clearly into it.
‘He says there were many of them and they kept him afloat all through the day and night, until the rescue craft spotted him in the water.’
‘What else?’ I asked.
‘That’s it,’ replied Tong. ‘He keeps saying the same thing over and over: “The dolphins saved my life. The dolphins saved my life.” It’s an amazing story, don’t you think?’
The old fisherman was being pushed into the ambulance backwards. Slowly retreating, he managed a final wave before the doors slammed shut. The reporter turned back to the camera and, in the time-honoured fashion, signed out and handed back to the main studio. For a few seconds we saw her standing there, saying nothing and continuing to smile into the camera as the wind blew her hair sideways. Then the screen went blank.
I turned in the direction of the armchair to see the former policeman’s outstretched hand holding the remote, finger still on the ‘off’ button. He then placed the remote on the floor and peered at us over the top of his glasses. For the first time I got a good look at him. He was in his mid-seventies but looked like he still kept himself in shape: he had neither a potbelly nor withered arms, the usual hallmarks of age or excess. Quite the opposite in fact: the gentleman I now faced, and had come so far to meet, appeared neither bent nor bowed but held himself stiff and straight, in military fashion. When he stood up it was with one swift movement, and when he walked towards me his stride was strong and well balanced, if a little slow. He was taller than me, but not by much, so I guessed that made him about 180 centimetres, which is exceedingly lofty in China. His handshake was firm, though he didn’t squeeze hard as some men feel the need to do in order to make a point or a show of strength. This person, whose eyes were now looking deep into mine, had no need to make such gestures; he already had an air of strength and authority about him.
A Boy of China Page 20