Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  In his mind cities were fantastic and impossible; opulent, yet indolent. They were places where idle men played games of mahjong with bronze and jade tumbling blocks, betting houses, wives, slaves, daughters, fortunes, mountains, rivers and armies on each round. Where the birds in the lush trees whispered to you the secrets of the local lottery; where palaces grew up from the ground like leisurely weeds while your back was turned, and dead men’s treasure might be found under any floorboard; where rich men slept until noon, and where even their chefs and messengers and Pekingese wore diamonds for teeth. To create these imaginary cities, Jinyi had pieced together scraps of fairy stories and conjured the opposite of everything he hated about his own life in the country: waking before dawn to chop firewood and grind flour for his aunt to cook, feeding the trio of bedraggled dogs, furrowing with chilled or burnt hands in the short field every afternoon till the sun descended, and, most of all, being thumped by a fist or thwacked with the handle of a rake for every word out of place, as well as for some never even spoken.

  As they crept along, Jinyi closed his eyes and drew a future on the inside of his eyelids. He had lain awake all night for months working up the courage to run, trying to decide where he would go. Then one afternoon a neighbour had told him an anecdote about the scores of sunburnt labourers setting new train tracks straight through someone’s field. Since sneaking out of the house two days ago while his uncle, aunt and gloating cousin slept, he had had only one destination. He would go to a station. And from there, the world would open like a clamshell prised apart in his fingers. He had thought of engines roaring out like the call of a circus. He had envisaged metallic dragons with crushed wings condemned to slither between provinces, of trains hollering in a language that might drive listeners to the edge of sorrow, their winding bodies glinting silver. Even then, half asleep behind the driver, he imagined the endless paddies cleaved by huffing locomotives.

  The idea of trains in a country of fields and mountains had already provoked desperate reactions. In 1876, China’s first railway was built by foreign businessmen who bought up hundreds of family plots and navigated round graves marked out on the principles of feng shui to connect the nine miles between Shanghai and Wusong. At first the locals flocked to the free rides, awed and fascinated by what was, for the imported British engines, a laughably short journey. The Qing government, however, was not impressed. After a soldier committed suicide by waiting on the line for the train to hit him, the railway company ran into difficulties with the official bureaucracy. In the end, the government negotiated to purchase the railway from the businessmen at a high price. Meanwhile, the trains continued to run, gaining in popularity while the government made its series of payments. The day after the last transaction completed the purchase, the government had the tracks dismantled, inch by inch, and sent away to gather rust. They had not considered, however, that inventions live apart from us, willing their own future from the depth of ideas.

  It was railways, too, after the exoduses of the gold rush, that consolidated many one-way journeys across the Atlantic. By 1865 the Central Pacific Railroad Company, two years into laying tracks for the transcontinental line snaking east from Sacramento, was in desperate need of labour to complete the joining of the railways across terrain that quickly shifted between sea-level and an altitude of 7,000 feet. They turned to the mass of Chinese immigrants around California. Despite an aborted strike, the fact that the Chinese were whipped and worked longer than the white labourers, and the high number of casualties from harsh winters and even harsher conditions in the tunnels being drilled, the last ten miles needed to join east with west were laid in a single day, 28 April 1869, by a joint Chinese and Irish effort. Imaginary borders are constantly redrawn behind cartographer’s backs, with sweat, with words, and, it hardly need be said, with dollars.

  The miniature labyrinths that blossomed in the shadow of America’s bigger cities, the ubiquitous Chinatowns, were not simple copies transposed to an alien continent, but chimeras capable of changing form at any second – towns which, if you were to walk in them for too long, would shift their streets beneath your feet and become other places. It is not just scaled-down cities, but all ideas and fantasies that are reproduced, daily, with varying differences, until it becomes unclear which is the original and which the facsimile. The facts remains that, if there was an original, it is irretrievably buried beneath the successive smudges and alterations of an ever-thickening palimpsest. And, in this junkshop of history, cities learn to wear their wounds like prizes, knowing that this is how they survive, like those tree frogs in the rainforest canopy whose colouring, rather than camouflaging, alerts the world to what might lie behind.

  So I know what you’re thinking. Why on earth am I following this mangy-looking runaway from the backwaters? Well, it’s pretty simple.

  Let me tell you what I learnt about Hou Jinyi from those early days. His body was a bag of jigs that he spent most days trying to master. He never knew what to do with his hands, and had learnt from a young age that speaking about their feelings only made men weak. He was driven equally by a desire to find somewhere that would finally feel like home and the lurking suspicion that he would never find it.

  One other thing – there was a restlessness in his heart common to all orphans, a deep-seated fear that if he ever let himself love something it would be taken from him. Perhaps that fear was not as foolish as it might seem.

  I do not just tell stories – I am a part of them too. Take a look around and you might find that the same could be said of yourself, regardless of whether you are immortal or not. And so, I would like to think that, in some way, I had an influence in Jinyi’s choice of a job in a small kitchen.

  ‘You’re going to burn your whole bloody hand off if you don’t quit daydreaming, mate. And I’m not going to put my balls on the line for you again. You’ve been doing it for weeks. Just watch me.’

  ‘All right, I know what I’m doing – you just concentrate on your own side. You know yours always gets overcooked. No one wants any of that burnt bitter sugar; it sticks on your teeth and you can taste it for days,’ Hou Jinyi replied, mocking his colleague to hide that he had been momentarily far away. He leaned further forward over his vat.

  ‘By the devils!’ The elder boy continued as if Jinyi had not spoken. ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re daydreaming about. Now, if you’d come out with us last night to the Celestial Gardens, you’d have something to remember – they treated us like gentlemen, you know. Not like the old women in the barber’s backroom on the corner. Worth every extra jiao.’

  Hou Jinyi raised his eyebrow and looked at his friend for the first time during his speech and then laughed. ‘One week’s pay, just for some girl. You can’t tell me she was worth that much, whoever she was.’

  ‘Worth every extra penny.’ Dongming said again, and grinned to himself as he stirred the glowing vat of bubbling sugar. ‘You’ll understand one day.’

  Though he had only recently turned nineteen in that warm spring of 1942, Dongming attempted to assume the air of worldly teacher to Jinyi, who was only a few years younger and stood nearly a foot shorter than him. Despite the monotony of heating, stirring and pouring from the vats all day, Dongming gave the impression of never keeping still, his body alive with shrugs and twitches even on the rare occasions he stopped chattering. Jinyi, on the other hand, did his best to keep to a small rhythm of careful movements. These movements even extended to his face, where his lips occasionally twitched as though formulating ideas not ready to be spoken aloud. Dongming, despite his jokes, was too polite to point these out.

  On the wider streets of this small town in northern Hebei children were gathering with their grandparents. They crowded round a seated figure who was dripping strings of caramelised sugar onto a cold surface to produce crisp images of animals from the Chinese zodiac. Small sticks were thrust into these sticky webs of animal-shaped sugar so that they could be picked up and eaten.

  The work done by Don
gming and Jinyi required little of this artistry. In the heat of the stone room where they melted the sugar before adding water and spice, they stood naked but for their rolled-up trousers. The steam that rose from the sugar matted their hair to their heads. A third worker had come and gone, having sustained disfiguring burns from the wild bubbling and spitting of unwatched caramel. Their days were spent stirring, topping up and pouring the caramel into metallic moulds, which they then set to cool in the courtyard to await inspection from their doughy-faced boss, whom they had only once seen sober. He mostly stayed in the house next door doing the accounts and discussing philosophy with a collection of caged birds, which, with hooked nods and heavy flutters of wings, feigned interest in his ramblings.

  Each batch of candies was sold for more than Dongming and Jinyi earned together in a day. They worked, like everyone else they had ever met, from sunrise until the last shred of light had scurried from the sky, between six and seven days a week.

  After work Jinyi followed Dongming home, not because he had nowhere else to go (though this was indeed the case), but because the elder boy’s endless gibbering diverted him from his own thoughts. As their bare feet slapped against the dusty streets, Dongming kept up a rambling monologue that was only interrupted when the two of them spotted the Japanese soldiers or trucks.

  ‘Every year there’s more of them. Vicious bastards. You heard what happened to Little Ying, right? Brutal. Absolutely brutal. I reckon there must be some factory somewhere churning out Jap soldiers, because they can’t all come from those poky little islands, can they?’ Dongming looked around to make sure that they were neither near a checkpoint nor being followed. ‘You know what, I’d follow my brother right now and join the Nationalists if I thought that would swing things. It won’t, not while we’ve got the commies stabbing us in the back. You know everyone says they went into the country, gathered up and packed off somewhere to regroup, right? Unlikely, if you ask me. They’ve probably just given up. About time too. Let them disappear. We don’t need a bunch of cowards following Russia like fawning dogs.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Dongming. You haven’t got a clue. You’ve never lived outside this city. It’s different out there,’ Jinyi interrupted. Dongming stared at him, neither offended nor shocked, but with the pursed smile he always gave while formulating a suitable reply. ‘What I mean is, shouldn’t we be working together? We’re all Chinese. That’s all most of us have got.’ Jinyi bit his nails, and looked down at his feet as they walked along the narrow road.

  ‘Well, sure, but what does that mean, Hou Jinyi? Does that mean we’re going to get mansions and feasts everyday like the warlords in Beijing or the merchants down south? Fat chance. It’s an illusion. A rotten illusion that’s stealing sense from people, when we should be making ourselves stronger. Of course we all ought to fight the Japanese, but how can our armies work together when a man can’t even trust his bunkmate? How are we supposed to get stronger and fight the Japanese if we end up sharing everything we have with incestuous and inbred dopes from the dirt fields? You explain that to me!’

  The civil war had been raging since both of them were tiny children, when the figurehead and binding personality of the young Republic, Sun Yat-sen, had died in 1925. The brief Kuomintang and CCP alliance had quickly collapsed into purges and guerilla warfare. It had taken a rebel general’s desperate action back in 1936 to provide a united front against the Japanese as they began to spread out from the puppet-state of Manchuria. The general kidnapped the Kuomintang president Chiang Kai-shek to force him to join the Communists in resisting the Japanese. For this patriotic action, the general, Zhang Xueliang, was arrested and imprisoned by the Kuomintang for the next forty years.

  Since Jinyi did not reply, Dongming returned to his favourite theme, the future. But his colleague was no longer paying attention. Jinyi was back in the house from which he had escaped – coal clogging his pores and his aunt berating him for the paltry vegetables he had worked from a patch of the garden. He was back where his uncle glared at him whenever the sound of his rumbling stomach could no longer be muted, where the damp crept through his bones, where the wind whistled demonic melodies. Where, at night, the four of them in the crumbling shack in the deserted valley slept the sleep of the shivering, repentant dead. Where each day had begun with a headache, sore muscles, sweat clinging to unchanged clothes. How was it that the years since he had left had passed in the same way as those hard years – thrown aside with the same practised movement of busy hands?

  Soon they came to the single-floor house, its brick walls tightly squeezed together in a lane barely wide enough for a bicycle. On either side, the neighbours’ petty squabbles could be overheard. The house consisted of two joined rooms backing onto a small courtyard where all the families on the street shared a fire for cooking and boiling water. As they crossed through it, Jinyi glanced at a young girl washing her knee-length raven hair in a wooden bucket. Though they were now used to Jinyi visiting, the family had still swept the house and gathered together some wrinkled vegetables so that they would not lose face.

  They ate in a muddle of noise, with the younger brothers tumbling across each other as they grabbed at the few dwindling dishes, the sisters attempting to disguise their gauntness with what they falsely conceived as grace, a grandmother asthmatic and nibbling like a giant wheezing caterpillar, two unmarried aunts, and the patriarch ever more distant as the dusty bottle of liquor came closer to emptiness. Only in conversation about the missing brother did the family begin to raise their voices.

  ‘He’ll be having it rough now, sleeping with his eyes open, what with the Japs heading further south now –’

  ‘No … the Japs are cowards at heart, everyone knows that. It’s fighting alongside the commies that he’ll have to worry about. He’ll need to watch his back –’

  ‘He’ll be back by Spring Festival, you’ll see.’

  ‘You’re crazy. There’s plenty of work needs doing before anyone can pack up and pull out the firecrackers –’

  ‘I don’t see what the fuss is about. We were fine before, we’ll be fine now. We’ve seen darker times than these. He ought to be thinking about marriage, a boy of his age. Nothing is going to change by –’

  ‘How can you even say that? The Japanese are carving up our country while the rest of the world looks the other way. It’s people like you –’

  ‘Quiet. All of you, eat your food and thank the dead that you’ve got your family and a loyal brother and a warm bed.’

  The Kuomintang was just one of the refuges of the family’s meagre hopes; Jinyi was happy to be ignored and, for once, not asked his opinion. Not because he disagreed, but because he still saw himself as an extra out of place in this strange and unconvincing scene. His world began and ended with glimpses of girls, scraps of food and fantasies of a pocket full of loose change. Later, as he lay in the cloying room shared between all the men of the family, on an animal skin bunched up over the cold stone, Jinyi counted the days since he had left home, weighing them up against the days ahead. In the midst of this melancholy mathematics he fell asleep.

  That night more troops rolled into town. The slow but steady crawl of vehicles and quick-stepping black boots continued their push south, overrunning town after town. It was faceless, this army, gliding across the maps like the sullen shadow of a low-hanging cumulonimbus. Each month, its numbers multiplied. It had swarmed down from Manchuria in the north, and every day issued new edicts from the capital of occupied territory that had been established (after a massacre to end all massacres, or so the rumours said) in Nanjing. Even the dead were buried quickly, outside the town, dotting the nearby hills with little mounds. If one were to suggest, to the starved, the exhausted, the executed, the maimed, the coughing-up-blood, the excluded, the bug-eyed big-bellied small-limbed kids, the battered, the paper-thin and the dry-mouthed that by the time their children came of age the country would be so populous that the government, worried there would soon be no room to house the blosso
ming population of the dead, would enforce cremation over burial, you might expect to be laughed at, or, more likely, pitied.

  Jinyi was used to the combat and fatigue uniforms on every street corner, as well as to the short sharp barks of an unfamiliar language filling the air around him. The schools had been emptied out for barrack space, so children now ran in the narrow lanes between the passing troops. The restaurants were closed and empty except for those in which the invading soldiers claimed meals on the house. The few Chinese still wandering the main streets walked quickly – but not too quickly – with their heads bowed.

  Within a month the candy business closed – the Japanese had placed tigher restrictions on the sugar ration. Dongming said nothing when they were dismissed by their drunk and bloodshot-eyed employer, and stayed silent as he and Jinyi sauntered down to the river to sit on the bank, unsure where to look for another chance.

  ‘There must be corners of this country where no one knows anything of history, of the present, of war, of Japan. Where no papers or messengers or troops reach. There must be,’ Jinyi mused.

  ‘If there was such a place,’ Dongming said, ‘Would you go there?’

  Jinyi picked up a stone and threw it a far as he could down into the sweep of the river. They watched it sink, neither bothering to pick up another.

  ‘No. But what I mean is, where are the places from all the stories? You know, the places our elders always talked about, where monks destroy whole buildings with the tap of a finger, where snakes and fish change into beautiful women, where dark-faced gods come down and dabble in all the difficult bits of life, or where lucky cooking pots double everything put into them? Where are those places? Anywhere’s got to be better than here, right now.’